And the word for 2024 is...

This blasted TV show has taken over my life 👨‍⚕️

It’s Saturday night, and all I can think about is how I have one episode left of The Artful Dodger and I’m terrified to watch it.

This stupid show, y’all!! It’s ruining my life1!!! I’m genuinely unwell over it. It’s like the worst book hangover but because of a TV show and it won’t go away. I go to bed thinking about the characters. I wake up stressing about their shenanigans. I think about them as I go about my day, lingering on the way the two leads look at each other, hoping they have a future together.

These are, and I cannot stress this enough, fictional characters. Yet I’m so worried about their, and again I must emphasize, fictional fates that I think I’m going to be ill. Gah! Storytelling is so incredible and my dream is to someday make my readers feel this brain-rotted over my characters!!!

In this issue you’ll find:

1. From the heart: word of 2024

2. From the camera roll: this feels self-explanatory

3. From the page: my Theory™️ about good writing & storytelling

From the heart 💗

I haven’t been great at clinging to my “word of the year” in the past few years, to be honest. I think 2021 was “joy,” and 2022 was, “growth,” I have no idea if I even chose a word for 2023…it’s chaos in my brain.

That said, I’m going to choose a word for 2024, and I’m going to chase it with everything I have, and seek to embody it as I go through my days. It’s kind of cheating, to be honest, because this is also the word that I chose for my last semester of grad school, which happened in 2023, but screw it, I think I can still handle focusing on this a bit.

Intentionality.

That’s the word. This beautiful graphic was made by my friend Crystal, and I’m so grateful to her because it’s a magical, visual representaiton of what I’m seeking to achieve in my writing.

For 2024, I’m going to chase it in all my actions. So much of my life is just a series of impulsive decisions, big or small, that pile up on top of each other and turn into something haphazard, often leading to actual issues. For example: what I eat. I have an Everyplate subscription, meaning every week I get a box of fresh ingredients so I can make home-cooked, healthy-ish meals. And then half the nights I plan to cook, 5 p.m. rolls around, I log off work, and decide I’m not in the mood to cook. So I order Wendy’s, or Five Guys, or Qdoba, or some other fast food that strips my bank account bare and leaves me full but un-nourished.

So in 2024, I want to be more intentional about what I put in my body and where I put my money. Rather than impulsively spending money on ordering in or taking Ubers when the train is literally right there, I want to think about what I’m doing, and whether the long-term effect is going to be worth the short-term gratification.

I want to be intentional in my relationships, too, reaching out to people I love more often and with a heart toward knowing how they are. And, finally, I still want to be intentional in my writing. There is so much depth that can come from stories written with intention. You know the ones I’m talking about — where it feels like every scene, if not every word building the scene, was chosen with care not just for the emotion it will elicit in the moment you read it, but for the ripple effects it will have on the rest of the story.

So often my writing is led by vibes and intuition, and that’s great, but I have this feeling that I’ll never achieve the greatness I crave if I don’t add a little bit of intention to my practice. My aim is still to entertain and reflect the world as I see it back to others, but I can’t lie and say that I don’t also crave things like critical acclaim and the validation that comes with someone saying, “Damn, you’re a good writer.” The knowledge that the words I carefully chose and implanted on the page resonated in someone’s heart. That’s a beautiful feeling.

Intentionality. That’s my guiding star-word for 2024.

From the camera roll 📸

From the page ✍️

I have this theory.

It could be totally incorrect, but it has wormed its way into my brain and set up a home there, and I’m going to share it with you today. Feel free to tell me in the comments if you think it’s totally hornswaggle2, or if you agree.

Basically, the theory says that books are made up of two things: the story, and the writing. You can have a great story without great writing; you can have great writing and a loose story. Or you can have a beautifully told, finely-crafted story of a book.

Before I started at VCFA two years ago, I was complaining to all my friends that I was “a good writer and a bad storyteller.” In short, I thought the quality of my writing far superceded that of my ability to string together a story. I thought this because I hadn’t ever thought too deeply about structure (I didn’t include an intentional3 act structure to my novels until my seventh, which lo and behold is the book that got me my agent), but I knew people resonated with my words, and I assumed that’s because I was good at stringing them together to create impactful sentences.

Now, two years later, I fear I’ve gone too far in the opposite direction: my stories are solid but my writing leaves much to be desired.

Maybe this is just me experiencing the tastse gap4, but regardless, it’s deeply frustrating. I read books that are beautiful and whose authors play with language in ways that enthrall me, and I despair of ever being able to do the same.

And that brings us back, of course, to intentionality. I truly believe that if I were to slow down, trust my instincts but push beyond their surface to the depths below, I could achieve greatness. I dunno, maybe I’m delusional, but — this delusion gives me joy and something to work toward, a tether to this life5, and as I’m in the process of losing one tether, I will take all the new ones I can find.

There you have it: my theory of writing and storytelling. What do you think?

Alla prossima 👋

That’s all for this week, friends! Quick programming note that I’ll be skipping next week’s missive; mostly because I don’t have anyone to interview for the Q&A, lol, and so I decided to pretend it was an intentional holiday break. Kinda ruined the pretense by telling you about it, didn’t I?

There’s so much horrifying new information that’s come out from Gaza this week. Not only did the IDF kill three hostages (you know, the people they’re presumably bombing Gaza to rescue) after mistaking them for civilians (why are they targeting civilians???), there were also reports that they bulldozed tents, burying and crushing the Palestinians within. The UN voted for a ceasefire but it’s not a binding agreement, and the US continues to back the genocide. It’s enough to make me want to enter those ridiculous contests to “get a coffee” with Joe and Kamala if only so I could tell them to their faces to make this end, but I refuse to give them any money to enter their stupid raffles.

I am angry. I am angry and I feel broken when I think about what’s happening and how the world is letting it happen. If you, too, feel anger and despair, horror and sorrow, know that I am with you in those feelings. Let us continue to fight, doing what we can to put an end to this travesty.