True Stories, Told with Craft

Write about an assumption people consistently make about you based on your appearance, your job, your background, your name, or your personality — and why it's wrong. Describe specific moments when the assumption was applied to you and what it felt like. What does the gap between assumption and reality teach you about how identity works?

Write about something you're obsessed with — a hobby, a topic, a collection, a question, a period of history, a type of food. Don't just describe it; explain it. Why does this particular thing captivate you? What does your obsession reveal about what you value, fear, or desire? Write with enough passion and specificity to make a non-enthusiast understand.

Write about a ritual in your life — morning coffee, a weekly phone call, a seasonal tradition, a bedtime routine, a run, a prayer — and what it actually does for you beyond the surface activity. Why this specific ritual? What would break if you stopped? What does it protect you from or connect you to?

Write about a place — a city, a room, a landscape, a building — that fundamentally changed who you are. Not because of what happened there (though that matters) but because of what the place itself did to you. How did the architecture, the light, the people, the rhythm of the place rewire something in your brain?

Choose the single most formative year of your life — not the best or worst, but the year that, when it ended, you were a fundamentally different person than when it started. Write the year as a narrative: what happened, in what order, and how each event connected to the next. What was the question the year was answering?

Write about a cultural phenomenon, technology, or social norm that has become so ubiquitous that we've stopped questioning it: algorithmic recommendation, tipping culture, the 40-hour work week, wedding traditions, the way we use "busy" as a status symbol. Defamiliarize it. Make the reader see something they look at every day as if for the first time.

Write a critique of the industry you know best from the inside. What does your industry consistently get wrong — about its customers, its workers, its own purpose, its approach to innovation? What do insiders know that outsiders don't? What uncomfortable truth would your industry rather not discuss publicly?

Choose something people are nostalgic about — a decade, a technology, a social norm, a type of community — and write about what the nostalgia conveniently forgets. Not to dismiss the nostalgia but to complicate it. What was actually lost? What was gained? Who benefits from romanticizing the past?

Identify a widely-acknowledged problem — in your industry, your city, your country, your daily life — that everyone agrees exists but no one seems to be fixing. Write about why. Is it a lack of solutions, a lack of will, misaligned incentives, or the fact that the problem benefits someone powerful enough to prevent change? Name the actual obstacle.

Write about how the language around a specific topic shapes our thinking about it: "human resources" (people as corporate assets), "collateral damage" (civilian deaths), "content" (art and information), "self-care" (structural problems individualized). Pick one piece of language and unpack everything it reveals about power, values, and what we're trying to obscure.

Choose something everyone uses but few understand: the electrical grid, a credit score, the food supply chain, how a search engine ranks results, how rent prices are set, how a hospital bill is calculated. Research and write an explanation that makes the invisible machinery visible. Make a reader feel smarter for having read your piece.

Choose an industry, institution, or cultural phenomenon and trace where the money goes. Who profits? Who pays? What's the markup at each stage? Where do the economics diverge from the public narrative? Write an essay that follows a dollar from the consumer to the final beneficiary and reveals every hand it passes through.

Write an immersive "day in the life" profile of someone whose daily reality most people never see: a 911 dispatcher, a long-haul trucker, a public defender, a content moderator, a hospice nurse, a garbage collector. Spend real time observing or interviewing. Write with the specificity that only firsthand reporting can provide.

Write about a historical event, person, or movement that was significant but is absent from mainstream education. Why was it omitted? Who would benefit from knowing this history? What does its absence reveal about how we decide what counts as "important" history?

Research and write about a policy, technology, or social movement that produced a significant unintended consequence — a drug meant for one condition that treats another, a law designed to help that ended up harming, a technology built for one purpose that transformed an entirely different field. Tell the story of the surprise.