“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
These words from George Orwell cut to the heart of freedom of expression—the necessity of speaking uneasy truths. As a writer who observes humanity’s contradictions and hypocrisies, you have a duty to challenge authority, expose injustice, and disrupt the status quo—even when your words seem futile, mere acts of resistance against overwhelming forces.
In Politics and the English Language, Orwell warns that vague, euphemistic language serves to obscure reality and protect those in power. “Political speech and writing,” he observes, “are largely the defense of the indefensible.” Writers who refuse to get lost in this linguistic fog pose a direct threat to authoritarianism and propaganda. Clear, honest, uncensored writing becomes a window through which readers might glimpse realities they would otherwise ignore.
Authoritarian power thrives on misdirection, vague language, and the suppression of dissent. To write boldly is to refuse complicity in this silence. Consider the moment on January 22, 2017, when Kellyanne Conway defended false claims about Donald Trump’s inauguration crowd by calling them “alternative facts”—a phrase that perfectly epitomizes Orwellian truth distortions. American journalist Chuck Todd immediately countered: “Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”
A writer’s role is to sharpen and reveal, not to dull or obscure. This is why Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, emerging from her fascination with American Puritanism and totalitarian regimes, resonates so powerfully as a warning. It’s a risky position—history is rife with horror stories about those who challenge power—but the alternative is surrendering language to manipulation.
George Orwell and Margaret Atwood understand that writing is not merely a craft but a flame thrower against oppression. The world teems with unbearable lies and semantic noise, but writers possess both the ability and the responsibility to refute and clarify them.
For a writer, true liberty can only be achieved by writing boldly and speaking truth to power.
The New World Coffee House, a Eugene, Oregon establishment that opened in 1964, was a gathering place reminiscent of the bohemian cafés of San Francisco and Berkeley. It attracted the university’s political crowd, hosted live music and art shows, and served as a hub for tarot readings, quiet contemplation, and grassroots organizing. It was the kind of place where people met to plan protests, form committees, and discuss current affairs.
Its owner, Vic Sabin, remodeled the interior of the building at 1249 Alder Street using salvaged fixtures, doors, and stained glass windows from torn-down houses, giving the space a distinctive bohemian aesthetic. The café featured round tables made from wooden spools alongside square café tables, while a long communal table in the back encouraged socializing. A funky old piano stood in one corner, which Jerry Rust, founder of the Hoedads, remembers his friend Scott Bartlett using to deliver laid-back sounds that enhanced the atmosphere. A large wood stove provided warmth during chilly Eugene days, with customers often rising from their seats to throw another log in when the café felt cold. A small courtyard behind the coffee house, adorned with tables and plants, provided an inviting outdoor retreat.
Most significantly, New World was the first café in Eugene to serve espresso. At a time when most coffee in town came in the form of percolated diner brews or drip coffee, New World introduced locals to freshly pulled espresso shots. The café also served coffee made in beautiful handblown Chemex carafes kept warm in water baths, using overroasted beans from Capricorn in San Francisco. The café set a new standard, paving the way for the city’s evolving coffee culture and inspiring future coffeehouses to follow suit.
This photo, originally published in the Oregon Daily Emerald, was taken in front of New World Coffee House in 1966, the year the Beach Boys played at McArthur Court.
Beyond its pioneering role in Eugene’s espresso culture, New World was also the first café in town to use Torani syrups to flavor specialty espresso drinks. It introduced Amalfi sodas, its own version of the Italian soda that had been popular in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood for decades. The syrups were supplied by Ira Frankel, a local food distributor who sourced them from San Francisco. New World also created a signature drink called a Cappuccino Borgia, made with espresso, chocolate powder, and orange peel, topped with whipped cream. This unique creation lived on long after the café closed—The Coffee Corner kept the drink in circulation in Eugene as a Café Borgia, and Jim and Patty Roberts took the Borgia north in 1976, where it’s still being made at their coffeehouse, Jim & Patty’s Coffee in Portland.
In its early years, New World sold pastries and cakes baked by Stephanie Pearl, who would later open the Excelsior Café. The menu expanded over time to include Hilda’s delicious soups, sandwiches, omelets, bagels, quiche, and more. Rumor has it the San Marino Chocolate Cake was to die for.
In 1968, the same year the Odyssey Coffee House and Theater opened in Eugene, Vic Sabin sold New World to a group of university professors, who attempted to run it as an employee cooperative. However, financial struggles plagued New World under its new management over the next few years.
Economic difficulties, inefficiencies, a huge staff, and a lack of clear leadership hindered its operation. The cooperative model, while idealistic, suffered from communication breakdowns and operational chaos. Maintaining seventeen employees also proved unsustainable.
By 1971, New World shut down, putting up a sign in the window that read: “Closed Forever.” But its story didn’t end there. Under new management, the café reopened a few months later with a leaner staff of just seven employees, all close friends of the new manager, Peter Winograd. This streamlined operation gave New World a second life, but only for a few more years before it finally faded from Eugene’s coffee culture in August of 1974.
———
A note on the Oregon Daily Emerald image:
Brandy Feldman, the girl who doesn’t dig Mike and Carl’s music, made the local news the following year when she participated with other college students and SDS members in an unsanctioned afternoon of making street art.
What happened was, on April 12, 1967, a group of so-called beatniks and hippies, armed with colored chalk, wrote slogans and drew flowers and other symbols of peace and love on the sidewalk in front of the student union. The backlash from the football-fraternity mentality for this “chalk-in” was swift, as members of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity (already notorious on campus for hippie baiting) responded first with threats of violence against the group, and then with spitting, shoving, kicking, and pulling hair.
By the end of the fracas, the ATO frat-bros dumped buckets of water on the sidewalk to erase the hippie graffiti that had so offended them.
Writers reveal things about characters through dialogue—not just by what they say, but by how they say it. Everyday speech is typically associated with half-finished thoughts, pauses, and meandering tangents. A writer must have a finely tuned inner ear for language—one that captures the essence of real speech and translates it onto the page without making it sound like a mere transcription.
A well-tuned ear works like a Babel fish, interpreting the pauses and subtext of spoken language into something that feels authentic but remains intentional and readable.
“Well-written dialogue,” writes screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, “is the way people wish they could talk.” It is refined, sharpened, and layered with meaning.
Great dialogue is as much about what’s not said as what is. Tennessee Williams mastered this in A Streetcar Named Desire, where Blanche DuBois never declares her fear of aging and irrelevance—yet every line she delivers carries the weight of her desperation.
“The most important thing in dialogue is not what is said but what is meant.” — Peter Brook
A conversation on the page should always have an underlying current—something bubbling beneath the words. Each character should have their own distinct voice. If you remove the phrases that indicate who is speaking from a conversation in your story, can you still identify the speakers? If not, your characters may be blending together.
I read plays to absorb the music of refined dialogue. Writers can also crowdsource dialogue, eavesdropping on conversations in coffee shops and writing down snippets of chitchat that tickle the ear. I’ll rewrite those fragments, cleaning them up so they still feel genuine. I also summarize social media comments from distinct voices and rewrite them, which is another form of theft, but I revise to make it my own.
Exceptional dialogue comes from elevating the raw material of ordinary speech.
Being a student of conversation and playing with dialogue on the page will give your characters voices that are expressive, engaging, and dynamic.
Words have rhythm, texture, personality. They can whisper or thunder, stretch like melted cheese or snap like a twig beneath the misstep of a clumsy ninja apprentice. Sometimes, words just want to play.
Some writers wield language like Sweeney Todd, slicing through ambiguity with precision. Others treat it like a border collie on an agility course, leaping from syllable to syllable, twisting and tumbling until words land in unexpected places.
Take alliteration. Vladimir Nabokov famously begins Lolita with an invocation of sound:
“Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.”
There’s something delightful about the way the syllables sing in that sentence. Inspired by that playfulness, I once wrote an article about the human hand, calling it “the adroit acrobat of anthropic anatomy” and describing its “flexible fingers that flutter with finesse in fantastic feats of dexterity.”
Is it too much alliteration? Maybe. But does it make the reader feel something different than a straightforward description of the hand? Absolutely.
Then there are puns. Oscar Wilde once quipped,
“Work is the curse of the drinking classes.”
Shakespeare wove puns into Hamlet, TwelfthNight, and RomeoandJuliet, making them both tragic and comedic devices.
Wordplay is the beginning of cleverness but also a tool of subversion. It makes a reader pause, laugh, or see something from a new angle. It lightens dark subjects, sharpens satire, and makes prose more alive.
In my own writing, I use wordplay sparingly, strategically. I try not to overdo it, but I want each page to contain something surprising amid straightforward prose—something that grabs the reader’s attention.
Try playing with assonance. Insert double entendres. Invent portmanteau words like blunderstand (to completely misinterpret something in an embarrassingly obvious way) and procrastibaking (to bake as a means of avoiding responsibilities).
Shakespeare, Nabokov, and Wilde knew that language is elastic. It bends, stretches, and reshapes itself to fit meaning—but only when a writer dares to play. Have fun!
When I say “cultivating” other writers as friends, I mean both acquiring and nurturing those relationships.
Writing is a solitary endeavor—just you, the page, and your thoughts. But writers cannot thrive in total isolation. Having other writers as friends is not just beneficial—it’s essential. They provide insight, encouragement, and a shared understanding of the writing life that non-writers simply can’t offer.
Jordan Rosenfeld, author of How to Write a Page-Turner and Fallout, was asked in Writer’s Digest what she can’t live without in her writing life. She answered:
“Other writers, both as friends and critique partners, and for the books they write. I recommend this too, because it’s not wise to rely on our spouses or family members or non-writing friends. As for other writers-as-authors, they teach me and entertain me. I read voraciously and widely and am always learning something about my own craft as I go.”
Writers have a unique perspective on written language. They obsess over sentence structure, argue about Oxford commas, and analyze character arcs and narrative tension. A good writer friend understands why we agonize over a single paragraph. They’ll listen to our story ideas, help us untangle plot problems, and tell us the radically honest truth—kindly but firmly—when something isn’t working.
Beyond critique, writer friends offer motivation. Writing can be lonely and discouraging. Self-doubt lurks in the creases of every turn of the page. A supportive community reminds you that struggling with a draft doesn’t mean you’re failing—it means you’re writing. Other writers celebrate your wins, commiserate over rejections, and push you to keep going.
And then there’s reading. Writers need to read widely, and writer friends introduce us to books we might never pick up otherwise. They expand our understanding of craft, inspire new ideas, and remind us why storytelling matters in the first place.
Cultivating friendships with writers isn’t just about networking, it’s about camaraderie.
Writing is a long road trip, and it’s better traveled with company.
Whenever a writer recalls a memory, the brain rewires it. This process, known as memory reconsolidation, means that memories are not retrieved in their original form but reassembled each time they are accessed. This makes memory vulnerable to distortion, omission, and even fabrication.
Our brains don’t store memories like a digital archive; they reconstruct them from fragments, filling in gaps with assumptions and contextual clues. This is why two people can recollect the same event differently—they’ve reconstructed the memory with different missing pieces.
Emotion plays a significant role in memory stability. Highly emotional experiences are more likely to be remembered vividly due to the amygdala’s influence on encoding. But that vividness doesn’t guarantee accuracy—it only makes us more confident in what we recall, whether or not it’s true.
That’s why it’s important to jot down memories quickly—before nostalgia or time distorts details, before they morph into wishful embellishment. Revision inevitably alters how we frame the past, and great writers have always known that memory is a story we tell ourselves. Writing shapes that story as much as remembering does.
If we don’t write down our memories before our brain rewires them, we risk rewriting them.
And since good writing comes from rewriting and revision, here is an effective way to keep the past intact while allowing it to evolve:
1. Write a first draft and spill out details exactly as you recall them. Let it be raw, unfiltered, and unpolished.
2. Make a copy to revise. Now, you can shape the narrative, refine language, rearrange structure, and emphasize meaning over strict accuracy.
The original draft remains a preserved artifact of how you initially remembered something.
This is especially useful if you’re fictionalizing real experiences. Memoir and fiction serve different masters—one strives for truth, the other for emotional resonance.
Neuroscience tells us that memory is fluid. Writing makes it tangible.
If we want to capture truth before it shifts, we must write—and then rewrite—with intention.
There’s a paradox in writing: the only way to get better is to write. But self-doubt can keep you from starting.
Many writers hesitate when the words aren’t quite right—when an idea feels incomplete. They don’t want to write something bad so they wait. Writers tinker with first sentences, convincing themselves they will write more sentences when they’re ready. This is a prison sentence.
Perfection is an illusion—no first draft is flawless. Writing well starts with writing adequately. Sometimes these early attempts are populated with the darlings that Stephen King advises us to kill, but most great books and brilliant short stories began as something unfinished, messy, and imperfect.
Anne Lamott calls perfectionism “the voice of the opressor.”
“It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.”
Salman Rushdie believes it is a kind of stasis and could not possibly be the goal of art.
“Instead, imperfection made meaning possible, made story possible, made life possible.”
And Bradbury compared early drafts to vomiting on the page. Just get it all out so you have something to work with later.
Writers who do the work and do it well begin to succeed when they are willing to embrace imperfection. They accept that a first draft isn’t meant to be good. They understand they can revise a flawed page but they can’t revise a blank one.
“There’s a crack in everything,” says Leonard Cohen, “that’s how the light gets in.”
So, give yourself permission to write mediocre sentences. Let clichés enter your train of thought and spread their legs on the subway seat. Let it be awkward, rambling, incomplete. Revision will fix it later. But the words have to manifest first.
If you sit down to write and hear that critical voice whispering, This isn’t good enough, remind yourself: it doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to write something perfect.
Forget the advice to write what you know. If writers only stuck to personal experience, we’d have no science fiction, no fantasy epics, and no historical fiction exploring distant times and places. Mary Shelley wasn’t a scientist reanimating corpses, and Jules Verne never journeyed 20,000 leagues under the sea. What united these visionaries was something more powerful: an insatiable curiosity for ideas that transcended their reality.
More important than writing what you know is writing what fascinates you. What makes you lean forward in a conversation? What do you research obsessively, just for the pure joy of learning? These interests are where your most compelling writing will emerge—not from cautiously staying within the boundaries of personal experience, but from the exhilarating journey of discovery.
Ray Bradbury wrote that imagination should be the center of your life. His stories were drawn from childhood fascinations that never dimmed—rockets piercing the darkness of space, mysterious carnivals arriving in the night. His imagination infused every page, and because he was utterly enthralled by his subjects, generations of readers have been captivated too.
The best narratives often emerge when writers follow their interests down unexpected pathways. Diana Gabaldon never intended to write historical fiction—until watching a Doctor Who episode featuring a Scottish character ignited her imagination. That spark grew into the Outlander series, a time-traveling epic that spans centuries and continents.
Consider J.R.R. Tolkien, whose profound obsession with ancient languages and Norse mythology was so strong it couldn’t be bound by academia. That passion birthed an entire world—Middle-earth—complete with its own languages, histories, and mythologies.
In this context, research transforms from tedious homework into a thrilling treasure hunt. If you find yourself intrigued by 18th-century pirates, the bizarre realities of quantum physics, or the secretive practices of medieval alchemists, follow those interests wherever they lead.
So don’t limit yourself to what you already know. Write what ignites your curiosity, and you’ll never run out of stories to tell.
If you think writing is too difficult—that you don’t have time or aren’t in the mood—consider this incredible story of a Parisian journalist who wrote under inconceivable circumstances.
“In the imagination and dreams of people who are cut off from the world, words are ballet dancers.” —Jean-Dominique Bauby
Jean-Dominique Bauby, an editor at Elle magazine, thrived in the fast-paced, glam world of fashion and media. Then, at 43, the lifestyle he cherished vanished in an instant. A massive stroke left him with locked-in syndrome—fully conscious but completely paralyzed, unable to speak or even breathe without assistance. The only part of his body he could control was his left eyelid.
That single functioning eyelid became his writing tool. A transcriber named Claude Mendibil would hold up a card with the alphabet, pointing at the letters in order of frequency in the French language. When she reached the letter he wanted, he blinked. Letter by letter, over two months, blinking three hours a day, he composed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly—an extraordinary memoir of imagination and memory. Some 200,000 blinks in total.
“In my head I churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph.” (JDB)
Most writers’ obstacles pale in comparison. Yet, self-doubt, procrastination, and perfectionism paralyze us just as effectively. But writing doesn’t wait for perfection. Writing happens in imperfect conditions.
Whenever I feel like writing is too much of a chore or when I don’t have the “right mindset,” I think about this remarkable writer. Bauby had every reason not to write. He could have surrendered to despair, to the impossibility of his condition, but he refused to pity himself.
If you’re tired, write badly. If you’re uninspired, write something meaningless. If you’re busy, steal five minutes. The writer who writes imperfectly still moves forward; the one who doesn’t write at all stays stuck.
Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote under unimaginable circumstances. What’s stopping you?
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” –Thomas Mann
Every writer, at some point, faces the question: Am I really a writer? The answer lies in action, not contemplation: Writers write. Not when inspiration strikes, not when they feel like it, but as a daily discipline. Writing isn’t an occasional burst of creativity—it’s a practice.
Gail Sher’s first noble truth for writers is simple: Writers write. If you write, you’re a writer. If you don’t, you’re not. Professional writers don’t wait for perfect moments; they know waiting is futile. The real work happens in the act of putting words on the page—whether brilliant, mediocre, or terrible.
Great writers understand this discipline. Ernest Hemingway wrote every morning until midday, advising to “work every day” regardless of circumstance. Stephen King produces 2,000 words daily, seven days a week. Haruki Murakami rises at 4 a.m. and works for five to six hours straight, maintaining this schedule for months during a project. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing,” he explained. Joan Didion begins her day by reviewing the previous day’s work, creating continuity and momentum. Toni Morrison wrote in the predawn hours while raising children alone and working full-time, proving that constraints often foster creativity rather than hinder it. Octavia Butler pinned a note above her desk reading:
Tell stories you want to read. Keep writing. Keep writing. Keep writing.
The secret is treating writing as a non-negotiable commitment. Marathon writing sessions aren’t necessary—just consistent time. Thirty minutes, an hour, whatever you can dedicate to your craft each day builds your writing foundation. Show up and write, even when every word feels like extraction. This habit distinguishes working writers from dreamers.
And here’s the reward: Writing generates more writing. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. Some days, words flow effortlessly; other days, they emerge reluctantly. But what matters isn’t quality—it’s presence. If you write, you’re a writer. It truly is that simple.
