The "No True Scotsman" fallacy happens when you start with a faulty generalization—"real writers write every day"—and then reject any counterexample by declaring it doesn't count. This essay walks through the lies writers tell themselves: that real writers don't have day jobs, don't need editing, don't struggle. If you've ever doubted whether you're a "real writer," this one's for you. Spoiler: you are. The only requirement is that you write.

What makes a villain unforgettable? Not that we fear them, hate them, or sympathize with them. Dolores Umbridge infuriates us. Hannibal Lecter charms us. The T-1000 is just a machine. But they all share one trait: every great villain is the hero of their own story. This essay breaks down why that matters—and how to write a villain who believes they're right, not just a jerk who wants power.

In Defensive Line, I use an extended football metaphor (bear with me—I only know roller derby) to talk about the difference between criticism and attack. Most writers feel defensive when someone critiques their work—that’s normal. The problem isn’t the feeling; it’s what you do with it. I share my own struggles with internal defensiveness, the mistake of dismissing feedback while pretending to accept it, and why learning to sort good criticism from bad is a skill you need long before you ever hear from an agent or editor. The goal isn’t to stop feeling defensive. It’s to stop letting that feeling control your response —and your revisions.

In The Four-Maggie Problem, I tell a true story from my early freelance editing days about a romance manuscript I was hired to copyedit. As I worked through the book, I kept encountering a character named Maggie—first as a bartender, then as a sibling, then as an emergency dispatcher, and finally in another role that made me realize something had gone very wrong. The story is funny, but the point is serious: if a major publisher once signed a book with the particular problem I uncovered, then your own draft is probably not as hopeless as you think. Keep going.

In Beauty and Marketability, I adapt Ross McCammon's "Two Beers and a Puppy" test to writing, sorting books into four categories based on whether they're intrinsically good and whether the market wants them. I look at examples from One Hundred Years of Solitude (a Yes-Yes: beautiful and wildly successful) to Fifty Shades of Grey (a No-Yes: terrible but enormously marketable) to The Brief History of the Dead (a Yes-No: lovely, acclaimed, and largely forgotten). The goal isn't to tell you which quadrant to aim for—it's to help you define what success actually means to you before you decide how to chase it.

In The Blind Mind, I explore what it’s like to read and write with aphantasia—the inability to visualize images in my mind. I share how I didn’t even realize my brain worked differently until my thirties, when a coworker mentioned how strange it would be not to see mental pictures. For me, reading means keeping a list of descriptive details rather than watching a movie in my head, and writing description comes more easily because I’m already translating from words to words—no image required. I also talk about my friend Goñi Montes, an artist with hyperphantasia who experiences most of his thoughts as vivid, multidimensional visuals, and how our friendship helped me understand the spectrum of how human brains can work. This is a heartfelt look at what it means to create stories when your mind’s eye is completely blind—and why that doesn’t have to be a disadvantage.

Catherine Forrest argues that the first step to doing something well is accepting that you will be terrible at it first. Using her own experience of working furiously at roller derby only to remain painfully mediocre, she explains that persevering at something you're bad at is invaluable practice for writing or any creative pursuit. She warns against comparing your raw first drafts to polished, professionally edited books you read for pleasure, and urges you instead to stop worrying about "getting good" and focus only on doing the work consistently, improving just a tiny bit each day from your own previous effort.