Nicole Chung

I’m grateful to all of you who’ve shared this space with me.

A conversation with Vauhini Vara about mentoring writers of color and expanding access to literary spaces

The writing, I often remind myself, is the best part. We’ll keep at it together.

It is hard for me not to think of my father’s death as a kind of negligent homicide, facilitated and sped by the United States’ broken safety net and strained systems of care.

Someone recently asked me if my parents’ deaths freed me to write about them. If anything, I feel an even greater sense of responsibility to our story.

‘What is one thing you can do to benefit your writing life?’ This whole year has been that for me.

“I want to help people think about all the different ways there are to live and to try to keep living.”

What to do when you get stuck working around a project instead of writing it, and how to talk with students about reading and writing

“If you want a reader to follow you to the darkest places, you have to make them laugh too.”

“The implication, whether people realized it or not, was that I was worth ‘saving,’ but my birth family wasn’t.”

“I believe that literature can create material change and open new worlds that haven’t existed before.”

It’s worth being curious about our ambitions, and open to reframing or adjusting them as we go.

Here are some of the strategies and shortcuts that help me focus and get back to writing, even when I feel the worst about it.

There are more truths to be found in one story than even the writer is capable of imagining.

Plus: finding a writing routine that works for you, and making the most of the time you have

From messy first drafts to revision spreadsheets, the author shares tips and insights from her own writing life.

One of the hardest things to do was to let go of the story I thought I would write.