Finn Schubert

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Finn Schubert

Does a computer give your drafts "too smooth a gloss"?

In November, following the publication of his presidential memoir, it emerged that Barack Obama wrote the entire 760-page tome by hand, on yellow legal notepaper with a pen. A pen!? "I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth

Are templates running our creative lives?

We need to talk about templates. These days, if you'd like to communicate an idea to another person, other than perhaps in casual conversation, there's a template for you. There's a Powerpoint template. There's an Instagram template. There's a website

A writing approach I'll never use

I have a confession. Judge if you want. I have always hated index cards. I have hated them since fourth grade when we were taught some irritating method of organizing our "bibliography" by tediously writing various information about books in specific places on the index cards. The directive

How to Be a Seahorse Dad

When your baby has a meltdown on the C train at rush hour and everyone stares – never fear. No one knows you birthed this little one you can't soothe. Let them imagine it's mommy's day off. Let them slot you into that well-trodden role

Knowing What You Really Want - Why I Left Substack

In response to a prompt in The Wayward Writer, I drew this: You can take up more space than you think. When people don't know what you're really about, that can be its own form of protection. I might say, "When you know what you&

The Most Glorious Pasteboard

From a review of one of Paul Monette's novels: Every act, every event is cut and re-cut by the author's sparkling prose and bizarre imagination to give us new facets, new depths and new insights. The characters aren't quite real and--this is the author&

The Madonna Secret by Sophie Strand

I've just finished reading Sophie Strand's The Madonna Secret. I love the voice in which the book is written -- where Miriam is looking back on her past, where Miriam can tell us the moments in which she wishes she had understood more or acted differently