Essay & Ideas
Generator

Writing non-fiction that works

• The argument should be specific enough to be wrong — vague arguments are unfalsifiable and uninteresting
• The personal essay isn't about you — it's about the thing you're using yourself to examine
• In reported pieces, the subject who resists the story is usually the most important one
• A good travel piece makes you feel the strangeness of the familiar, not just the strangeness of the foreign
• Memoir is most honest when it admits what the writer can't know for certain