#writing

Pay attention as you go through life and collect all the curiosities the tides of fortune deposit into your path. Then just put them in your work when the rightsized hole gapes.

Here is the progression of a sentence I wrote today from first draft to final form.

At the beginning of Chapter Ten of Madeline Miller’s Circe, the protagonist arrives in Crete, the island that her domineering sister rules oppressively.

The premise and the set are both interesting, but for so long I’m just waiting for something to happen.

As writing is selection, so is storytelling like curation.

Many features I’ve implemented on this site – e.g. revisions – encourage retroactive editing of posts.

I’ve read seven chapters so far. Here are some thoughts and some excerpts.

My live journal what I’m doing in 2025 is another experiment inspired by the ideas I originally explored in my essay The Virtual Book.

This piece is an experiment in live journaling.

In her novel Normal People, Sally Rooney exposes the hidden reasoning of our subconscious.

I anticipate confusion regarding the name of this site. How is it a book?

A virtue of concrete writing is that it causes a distinct mental sensation.

I began with this sentence:

These opportunities in my early life allowed me to become not only natively proficient in Spanish and English, but also multicultural.

Is wordiness inherently bad?

I want to make the following sentence more fluid by removing its commas, but they are preventing ambiguity:

Vague memories, without any obvious relevance to what I was witnessing, bubbled into my conscious mind.

Can quantifying the attributes of a TV show tell us something about its quality?

I had this encounter in October of 2022, almost two years ago.

In her New Yorker article about suspense, Kathryn Schulz uses a clever image to describe how suspense exists at many scales.

In November I posted my first /now update and since then I have posted three more.

Our roommate started dating our neighbor a couple months ago and it’s going great.

The main reason I read Cormac McCarthy is to experience and learn from his writing craft.

…looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of [Cormac McCarthy’s] voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished.

Sometimes, audio is the superior medium.

This site – okjuan.me/vbook – contains all my public writing.

One of my favorite movies of recent times.

I’ve been developing Muze Radio, reading Stephen King, watching Poor Things, and more.

Here’s an example of coordinated metaphors, something I wish other writers used more often.

Half memoir, half advice for aspiring fiction writers. Both good.

King’s advice is mostly for fiction, but some of it applies to non-fiction, too.

There was this little voice whispering to me that the book was really good, and if I didn’t finish, I would regret it forever.

Don’t come up with the plot of your story, says Stephen King.

I’ve been losing weight, playing soccer, developing this site, reading books, and more.

This page is inspired by Viktor Lofgren’s The Small Website Discoverability Crisis and Tom Critchlow’s list of digital bookshelves.

A not-so-secret desire of mine is to write non-fiction professionally.

I wrote an essay called The Virtual Book but I never defined the term.

I read half of The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer’s gargantuan, Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction novel about Gary Gilmore – and figured I could put it down and move on.

Take this quote by anthropologist Clifford Geertz:

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.

Suppose you have this sentence:

It leads us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future

Writing The Virtual Book forced me to ask: when is writing the best medium?

It’s important to keep your metaphors from bumping into one another.

This is my second review of this book. I have to say – it won me over, big time.

Notes about style and process of writing how to work #2.

Notes on style and process of writing The Virtual Book.

Decades ago, The New Yorker and other magazines experimented with the journalistic form by introducing literary techniques into it.

Notes about style and process of writing how to work.

Despite all my admiration and enchantment while reading Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast I couldn’t help but frowning at his writing mantra: “make instead of describing”. Surely he’s been describing all along?