Michaela von Schweinitz

During your first draft, you follow your impulses and venture into tributaries. Your job as a writer is to make sure that your readers don’t get stuck but safely reach the end of their journey.

I’m walking barefoot in my apartment. I love the touch of the smooth bamboo floor. Occasionally—when I haven’t wiped it for a while because I’m too busy with my work—I step on something I didn’t see and wouldn’t have picked up if my feet hadn’t registered it as big enough to care. I balance on one foot to check what got stuck under the other foot. I am always surprised by the size of my discovery. A piece of sand, a tiny breadcrumb, or lint—they all feel bigger than they actually are. My feet experience my surroundings differently than my…

In nature and in architecture, we find beauty in balance and symmetry. And so it is in writing. There is a lot of talk about story structure. Why do we teach story structure? A story is like a bridge with a beginning, middle, and end. When you get to that bridge, it only takes one step to be on it. That’s the beginning. From here you can see the end. That’s where you want to go. Once you step off that bridge, the story ends. Everything between, lifted from the world as you know it, is your story. Writers write stories, whether…

Take any of the trinkets crowding your shelf and inspect it in the daylight from your window. What makes you hold on to this item? Imagine a visitor asking about a chipped souvenir with raised eyebrows. Taking the souvenir from their hands, setting it safely back onto the shelf, what will you tell them? Your story gives meaning to a piece that others might disregard as junk. So you tell them about your mother who made this when she was a child growing up in a foreign country. Who left her home to pursue her dream in a new world.…