Episode 38: A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk

Here's what I learned from A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk:

-Sometimes your experience of something is enough, sometimes it’s all there is. You don’t have to share wisdom or lessons; you could just tell people what happened, and there's value in that.

-When you include disclaimers you water down the thing you were trying to say. It takes away from the truth and makes you unrelatable.

-Write unsparingly about yourself means to ONLY write unsparingly about yourself. You don't then try to redeem yourself after the fact. Just say the shitty thing and move on. When you try to redeem yourself it makes you unlikeable.

-When you write an analogy, the more parallels you can make the more vivid the analogy becomes.

-In a run-on sentence it's funny if you can add a conflicting statement—I want this but I also want the opposite of this. Also, the run-on sentence is more powerful if either the sentences just before or after are really short.

-If you want to tell a story that involves another person but you don't want to include them, you don't have to! You can leave them out completely, or, you can make it known that they were there but then still leave them out of the story. If the person doesn't add any relevance to your story, if their presence is more distracting than anything else, just leave them out.