The solution, according to some, is to buy a dumb phone—something with no screen or shiny apps to keep me busy. But unfortunately, my phone is not just a plastic housing for TikTok and Threads; it is also a tool that I need for my day job. I have to rely on security features to sign in to my job. When I travel from Maine to DC for work, I rely on my phone for my airline, hotel, and Uber apps. I also have the directional sense of a dust mote, so I rely on maps when I leave my house.

So, instead of swapping phones and living to regret it when I slam into a roadblock that requires me to use one of several apps, I decided to try something a little unorthodox instead.

I dumbed down my iPhone. Here is what I did:

Location & Privacy

I opened Settings > Privacy & Security and worked through these three items:

Turn off ad tracking

Tap Tracking and make sure Allow Apps to Request to Track is off. This stops apps from following my behavior across other apps and websites.

Audit Location Services

Tap Location Services and go through every app on the list. I set anything I don’t actively need to Never. Anything that does need my location, e.g., maps, weather, is set to While Using, which means it can only access my location when I am actively using the app, but no longer running in the background.

Turn off personalized ads

Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising > turn off Personalized Ads. This one is just so Big Brother to me. Hard pass. No thanks.

Delete Social Media

I deleted all of it. If I really want to check Threads, I’ll do it on my computer intentionally, not reflexively every moment I am bored. Any app that is designed to grab and hold my attention has no business being on a device I carry everywhere.

To be fair, avoiding Threads while I am working on my computer is a separate problem.

Time Limits & the Downtime Option

Under Settings > Screen Time, there is the App Limits setting, which is super great for getting strict about how often I let this device occupy my attention. Since I already deleted social media (my biggest time suck), setting time limits isn’t really effective.

Instead, I set up Downtime, which allows me to set specific hours when my phone doesn’t show me any notifications. Hearing that annoying ding everytime I get an email or text is enough to drive me batty, this feature pauses all of those notifications during my pre-set times. It also dims my screen as a gentle nudge that I should be off the phone, anyway.

Grayscale

I went to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters and I set my phone to grayscale. All of my photos are still in color, but the apps that still exist on my phone are not colorful. Personally, that makes the experience far less appealing.

No setting on my phone can ensure that I sit down and write, obviously. But there is something reassuring and calming about removing as many of the nonstop distractions as possible. It makes screen time—including writing—less anxious and more productive.

I exchanged a few friendly emails with the media contact, and we set up a day and time when I could call a recently retired homicide detective who, I was assured, would be happy to share stories and answer questions. When the day arrived, I nervously dialed his number, and within two minutes of ice-breaking conversation, we were deep into the weeds of dissecting old cases. It was, by far, one of the coolest interviews I have ever conducted.

Interviewing comes fairly easily for me since I have been doing it for a long time. As I’m coming off the high of that fascinating conversation with my new detective friend, I thought I would share some of my go-to strategies for how to guide an interview so that you get the most out of the time allowed.

Map Out Your Story Ahead of Time

Before you even start a conversation, it is helpful to know what you need before you ask for it. Sure, there are times when it is best to let a conversation flow naturally, but to get the most out of what will likely be precious little time, you will want to have your must-asks ready.

What is the general shape of the kind of information you are looking for? For example, I was looking to learn about the timeline between when a murder happens and when the police have a suspect in custody. That’s a lot of territory to cover, and I only had one hour to ask questions.

A strong interview begins when you are clear on your intent. Weak interviews happen when you show up to a conversation with a foggy goal in mind and zero prep work.

The question you are ultimately answering is, "What problem in my manuscript am I trying to solve that this expert can help with?”

From there, it is helpful to ask different types of questions to form the scaffolding to get the information you really need. For example:

• Scene details: What happens minute-by-minute? Who needs to be there? What are they doing?

• Character details: What kind of personality survives in this profession? What are some common personality flaws?

• Texture details: What’s annoying? What’s routine? What’s the vibe?

Be Ultra Curious

Get back to your basics: who, what, when, where, why, and how? But don’t lean on asking questions like a robot. You’re not using these questions to fill in answers like you’re studying for a quiz. Rather, you want to use questions to help encourage your subject to keep talking.

For example:

Asking about process: “Walk me through a typical day/shift/experience from the moment you arrive/start.”

Asking about deviations from the norm: “Talk me through the moment something goes totally sideways.”

Asking about perception: “What part of your job do people misunderstand the most?”

Asking about stand-out moments: “Can you describe a day that you couldn’t shake when you got home?”

The most important feature of these questions is that they give you the ability to follow a thread of storyline. If your interviewee says something surprising, follow that thread, even if it doesn’t fit your pre-determined questions.

Listen More Than You Talk

If you are talking more than 20% of the conversation, you need to step back and start listening more. Even if you prepared a killer list of questions, you still want to let your subject wander while answering. Some of the best moments in an interview come from surprisingly unexpected answers. That is a golden opportunity to follow the story they are giving you. If you’re too focused on your list of questions, you could easily miss it.

Silence is universally awkward. You can use that to your advantage by intentionally waiting a beat after your subject finishes speaking. Oftentimes, that small pocket of silence encourages them to keep going and fill the empty space with more details or clarifications.

Don’t Be Afraid to Sound Dumb

During my interview with the investigator, I asked, “Let’s say I call the police to report a murder. Who am I calling, and who actually shows up?” Turns out that was a great question because the answer actually surprised me, and I learned a lot about how law enforcement is structured in Maine.

If something doesn’t make sense, ask about it. Even if you think you know the answer, or it feels obvious or basic. Chances are pretty good that if you’re wondering about it, your readers will be too.

Respect the Clock But Don’t Rush

Time limits are real, and you don’t always get to extend them, no matter how amazing your conversation is going. Keep an eye on the clock so you can ensure that you hit all of your must-ask questions. But balance that with the natural deviations so that you can capture any little nuggets of information they offer through natural conversational flow.

You can always leave the door open by asking if you can reach out with more questions once you get started writing. Two cool things can happen if you do this: first, you just made a new expert friend. And second, you just got the opportunity to make your writing feel lived-in and authentic because you now have a trusted voice that can guide the accuracy of what you’re writing.

A final thought…

When you’re interviewing an expert for your manuscript, remember that the goal isn’t about gathering facts (although it could be!). What you’re trying to do is collect details to help your writing become believable. Listen for all the quirky stories, offhand comments, or the surprising contradictions that you think can help shape your work.

It also helps to include your experts in your acknowledgments to thank them for their expertise and time. You can build an impressive circle of experts that you can turn to for future projects by showing your curiosity and enthusiasm for having their voice included.

Good luck with your writing!

So, instead of giving you the same summary everyone gives you, I am going to share the big questions the following books ask. Maybe one is tinkering with the same question that keeps you up at night. And like any good literature, perhaps the answers you find in these stories will feed your hope and imagination. Or warn about what not to do.

Happy reading.

Tender Is the Flesh

by Agustina Bazterrica

What happens to morality when cruelty becomes normal?

If you are a word nerd, you will love (or be horrified by) the brilliant way Bazterrica’s characters weaponize language to show us what happens when we are forced to deal with an atrocity by choosing cruelty and comfort over dignity and humanity. The characters grapple with how they choose to (re)define evil, and it leaves us, the readers, asking deeply uncomfortable questions about morality.

Heads up: if you don’t do gore, then this is probably a hard pass. Tender Is the Flesh is described as splatter punk horror. And…whew...it surely is.

Madonna in a Fur Coat

by Sabahattin Ali

Can one experience of love define an entire life?

As an introvert and a generally quiet person, this story struck me as a lovely and haunting tale about the transformative power of being truly seen by another person. But what happens when someone who has felt seen and understood turns a single experience of love into both refuge and exile and quietly cuts themselves off from ever risking that kind of connection again?

The Stranger

by Albert Camus

What if life has no meaning, and you refuse to pretend it does?

To keep the peace, a society runs on the engine of invisible agreements. Think etiquette and manners, which give us the rules about how to behave, what to feel, and when it’s appropriate to perform those feelings for the sake of others’ comfort. These rules color the static background of our lives and are part of what gives each of us meaning.

But what happens when a person questions whether meaning is something we invent to feel safe? As in, maybe it doesn’t exist. Or, even more extreme, maybe our demand for meaning is absurd. And then what happens when they refuse to perform the emotions the world around them expects?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

Can you heal yourself by disappearing from your own life?

Have you ever fantasized about disappearing from your own life? Just for a little while? And have you wondered if self-erasure can be the same thing as restorative or healing? This fever dream of a story braids together sharp questions about alienation, privilege, and the seductive idea of escaping emotional and existential pain through extreme withdrawal.

I recommend this to anyone who has ever said, fuck it, I’m moving into the woods and becoming a bog witch.

The Employees

by Olga Ravn

What makes someone human in a world that treats people like tools?

It goes like this: you clock into your job and work like a robot until your shift is over, and then you clock back out and sometimes wonder privately what the hell is all of this even for?

This novel pits a sterile world built for extreme efficiency against the deeply human longing to feel things like desire, grief, and love. Some find those human reactions a nuisance or a sign of a flawed system. But others will read it as proof of being alive.

I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

Who are we without other people to tell us who we are?

Speaking of the what makes me human, anyway theme, this is a story that Camus and Ravn would love. It asks the next logical question in this line of storytelling: what happens if you strip a life of every inch of social context and shared history? If you have no horizon line—no reference point for being—then how do you know you have humanity? Is it something we inherit or something we build?

This book will haunt you.

A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck

How do you hold onto meaning in the face of infinity?

This is the book that keeps me awake at night. I had never encountered true existential horror before, but damn. Peck nailed it. In this short book, which will never leave you, you are asked to confront deeply terrifying questions about time, insignificance, and loss. But most profoundly, at least for me, are the questions about how fragile and ephemeral hope and purpose can be.

This book will double haunt you.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

by Stephen Graham Jones

What does violence turn a person into?

I have a soft spot for this story. On the one hand, this is the kind of storytelling that happens around a late-night campfire when everyone else is asleep, but you’re too transfixed to stop listening.

And on the other hand, this is a story that asks some profoundly complicated questions about identity and survival in the shadow of historical and personal brutality. Is monstrosity a choice? Or do we inherit it? And how do love, loyalty, and the very human desire for revenge warp and bend the lines between who is the protector and who is the predator?

Between Two Fires

by Christopher Buehlman

Can goodness still matter in a world that feels abandoned by God?

You could say that this is a 14th-century take on current events. Sheer, overwhelming evil comes at you from every direction, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Except hope. But in the face of relentless peril, how are we supposed to keep fighting while also holding our fragile faith intact?

What makes this story register so deeply is that it doesn’t treat goodness as grand or triumphant. Instead, it asks whether small, irrationally stubborn acts of mercy (the kind no one may ever see, which says a lot about these characters) can still carry meaning in a world drowning in suffering.

I’m a technical writer and editor at my day job, but I work remotely and am therefore extremely isolated, by most standards. This is not by accident. But a few times a year, my colleagues and I are beckoned to the main office in DC, and I end up spending quite a bit of time in the airport.

While at the airport, I carry a worn copy of JD Salinger’s Franny & Zooey. It is my comfort read when I travel, and I usually dive into it to warm up to my surroundings. It feels easier to convince myself that I don’t stick out as a gawker when I have something to read. But I rarely read for long because I’m watching people. And I love to take my time.

As a creative writer, I spend a lot of time in my head trying to conjure up interesting characters. People watching affords me the gift of observation to see how people move and speak and rush and complain all up front, in person.

I pay attention to details like how one man in Gate 47, a few seats away from me, wore incredibly beautiful leather loafers and no socks. He crossed his legs at his ankles, which were exceedingly pale white compared to his bronze face. His loafers were nearly the same color as his face. I found this jarring, to be honest. He kept scratching one ankle with the other, which I also found peculiar. And in my head, I made up a whole little scene about how this man was trying to look more exotic to impress someone. But who? My mind went on.

On another trip, I sat at the Wolfgang Puck Bar & Bites and ordered a seltzer water and marinated olives. I sat and quietly picked at my plate, my book open, while listening to one older lady telling another older lady all about her daughter-in-law’s plastic surgery. She deftly sprinkled in veiled insults that I thought were too perfect not to take mental note of for future dialogue.

In the women’s bathroom was a pack of teenage girls, each a carbon copy of the next, taking selfies and excitedly chattering. An exhausted mom exhaled deeply while her young daughter took too long to wash her hands. A type-A personality with luggage blocking a wall-mounted paper towel dispenser directed the line to empty stalls. A worker changed the garbage bag.

Outside, a sea of black suitcases and dark winter coats lined the paved sidewalks waiting for Uber’s, which never seemed to touch but were zipping in and out at every odd angle.

People. Everywhere.

So many ideas for characters.

Every time I talked myself into sitting down to write, my brain would cue up the litany of reasons why no one on God’s green earth would have any interest in my story. And that’s how several months passed with zero progress.

By the time I began working on it again, I was embarrassed, on top of feeling like an impostor and a failure. While I was complaining about this during a family dinner one night, my teen, with a bemused look on his face, said, “Mom, why don’t you just do the blank paper thing?”

When he was much younger, he would become paralyzed with anxiety over his math homework. So, I would take a blank sheet of paper and cover all the problems he needed to do except for the problem he was working on. Not having to see all 15 problems lifted his yoke of anxiety, and he was able to solve one problem at a time.

The blank paper method is simply a way to reorient your focus to only what is directly in front of you and nothing else. The problem for me, though, was that I wasn’t trying to work out simple algebra on a single sheet of paper. My project spans folders and notes and different documents. The only thing missing is some red yarn and a pack of cigarettes, and my project could have easily been mistaken for a conspiracy theory the way it just sprawled all over my desk.

So, I improvised.

Word Counts

I figured out that based on how my manuscript is styled, 1,000 words is roughly three pages. Sometimes, three pages felt like far too much. But one page? That was better than nothing. It was my one algebra problem. I could manage to get through one page.

Soon enough, I could get through two, three, or more. Sometimes I couldn’t. But at least I was writing again, and it felt like I was clawing my way back to productivity.

Ten Minutes

I once heard that it takes your brain around 10 minutes to warm up to anything you’re focusing on. Giving up before you give your brain a fair chance to be firing on all pistons is cheating your mind out of the opportunity to create something.

I quickly adopted the 10-minute rule, and while it did not always help to get me into that sweet zone of focus, at the very least, it gave me the space to reacquaint myself with the habit of sitting down for a set amount of time in front of my project. Even if the words I produced were hot trash at first.

Outline

Sometimes, the block wasn’t about fear so much as poor planning, which led directly to more self-doubt and fear. In those instances, I would return to my outline and staring right back at me was a shoddily organized scene or chapter that needed more time and research.

Not all writers lean heavily on an outline, but I do. When my scaffolding is weak, I tend to fall down. The beauty of outlining is that I don’t have to have all the answers or descriptions to create something I am happy to work with; it just has to give me a sense of direction so that I can write.

Chatterbox

Sometimes, I pretend to be someone else in my head. And that person is a chatterbox and doesn’t give one flying fuck if what they say is “good” or not. They just talk and talk and talk until they are spent. Some call this spontaneous prose. I call it giving my characters room to vent. I may not end up using any of what gets written, and that is fine. The goal is to write without fear.

At some point, I had to decide if I was going to be a coward and give up or if I would be brave enough to tell the negative voices to fuck right off. I knew that even if nothing ever happened with this manuscript, it still had to get written, or I would never let go of the worry about whether or not I was good enough to do it. So, eventually, I got to the part where I wrote The End. And I cried.

Now that I know my writer’s block was about fear, I have created a pile of tried and true versions of the blank paper method that work to pull me out of that awful place. And I hope that one or some of these versions will work for you, too.

Thank you for reading <3

stepping down
the sound scatters a brittle applause 
crunch 
and releases a scent of earth and smoke 
in russets and ochres and orange 
a stray green in the mix 
each a tiny echo of summer’s laughter 
folded into a crisp, quiet hush of the season’s last breath

I want to be extraordinary to you 
not loud 
not standing out in a demanding way 
But more like a quiet persistence 
a steady longing 
I want to be an unspoken first thought in the morning 
and the last wondering at night 
I want to be the reason for a 
rush of curiosity 
I want to be the gentle but unmistakable 
influence that colors your experience of beauty and mystery
Not your everything
just your something
that stays
even when I’m not there

I plowed my way through The Kaiju Preservation Society and The Collapsing Empire, chuckling at Scalzi's wit and admiring how he masterfully crafts effortless dialogue between characters, when I slammed heart-first into Red Shirts. Like the previous stories, I found myself delightfully amused all the way through the hilarious plot twists until Scalzi hurt my feelings.

To be clear, he didn’t hurt *my* feelings on purpose. Red Shirts wasn’t an emotional hit piece meant to be taken personally, although it certainly felt that way. I was a sobbing mess by the time I got to the very last sentence. And if I’m being honest, I’m not totally done feeling squishy and sentimental over it.

Without giving away too much, I’ll tell you that Red Shirts is a philosophical sci-fi parody that asks some big questions about free will, narrative control, and what it means to be a character in someone else’s story. Imagine Star Trek (the first one with Shatner and his ridiculous everything), but instead of following the main characters on the bridge, you follow the extras in the background. The red shirts, as they’re called in this book.

And these red shirts start to notice something’s off, like how crew members don't die if they're in extremely specific circumstances, or how reality itself seems to warp and bend around the main characters. These quirky idiosyncrasies turn the story into a surprisingly profound meditation on what it means to exist when your story was never really yours to begin with. By the time I got to the end, I wasn’t just rooting for the red shirts, I was steeping in my own what-ifs.

Over the past year or so, I have been feeling stuck, as if I am existing in a liminal space. While talking to a friend recently, I said this is a "figuring-out year". But I'm not entirely sure what I need to figure out. Nothing in my life is particularly terrible. And maybe that's it. Maybe it's the mundaneness of my life that has me feeling especially tender about how dismissed the red shirts' characters felt. They were pushed and pulled by forces out of their control. I get that.

My life is clouded by an unsettling feeling that I live in a groove that will, whether I want it to or not, continue to slog along on a predetermined path. But sometimes, I want to peek over its edge and see what else exists. Because maybe in a different timeline, I am not the barcalounger creating a safe and cozy landing spot for others.

In another timeline, to other people, I am dazzling and interesting, and important beyond what I can do to make their life comfortable. Maybe.

Anyway. In the words of red shirt, Andrew Dahl, “I don't care whether I really exist or don't, whether I'm real or fictional. What I want right now is to be the person who decides my own fate.”

And what a fate that could be. In another timeline.