Introducing WILF, et al. (A new season!)
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Welcome to What I Learned From… a newsletter that offers short essays, resources, and reading suggestions to help writers and essayists improve their writing craft. It's nice to see you here! If someone forwarded you this email because they love your writing, you can subscribe here. Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes “The knowledge I have now is not the knowledge I had then.” – Stokely Carmichael What I Learned From Coming Back …It’s spring again. Which, for me, often means returning to my writing life with a familiar mix of hope, hesitation, and mild exasperation. I've been here before. More than once. This time, I’ve finally built the right system, found the right rhythm, cleared enough space in my life to do the work the way I’ve always wanted to do it. And then, life happens. Work shifts. I need to travel to a new spot. Family needs pop up. Money gets tight. My attention gets pulled elsewhere. The pattern repeats. I retreat. I reemerge. I try again. There’s a particular kind of shame that creeps in when you’ve started something more times than you can count. Especially when that something is public. When readers and friends and clients have seen the cycle play out. It’s easy to feel like failure just lives in the repetition. But lately, I’ve been reminding myself: the repetition is the work. Maybe the most honest thing I can do right now isn’t to announce a triumphant return or draft a strategic relaunch plan. Maybe it’s to show up quietly and start paying attention again. Cause that’s always been the heart of this project. It’s always been at the heart of most of my creativity interests. In some ways, I think I’m just finding my way back to the kind of writing that started it all. The first official essay I ever published was called What I Learned During My Bedrest Vacation—written after I landed in the ER for exhaustion and was ordered to spend the last week of the year doing nothing but rest. The first piece that was picked up by another site? Lather, Rinse, Repeat: Life Lessons from a Shampoo Bottle. When Forbes head-hunted me to offer a column on their (then brand-new) contributor platform, it was because of a post I wrote that caught their attention called What Winter Driving Taught Me About Business. These weren’t hot takes. They weren’t built to go viral. They were small stories with meaning tucked inside. They helped me realize that writing wasn’t just something I did. It was how I understood the world. What I Learned From (formerly The Writing Rundown) isn’t about wringing productivity lessons from peak life moments. It’s not LinkedInsporn—the “I got engaged, here are five things it taught me about sales” brand of forced wisdom (though hey, there’s a time and place for people looking for that!) It’s about something older, quieter, and (to me) more sacred: the writer’s gift for noticing. For connection. For finding meaning in the small, strange, overlooked things that most people breeze past. It’s about seeing how a word, a phrase, a seasonal shift, or a cultural quirk can spark something deeper about writing, about creativity, or about simply being human. So I’m trying something different this time. Not a comeback with fanfare, but a return with rhythm. With enough breathing room to actually listen to what’s catching my attention, and share it with you. Here’s how it’s going to work: Most Saturday mornings, What I Learned From will arrive in your inbox with a short essay—always under a thousand words—about something I’ve been thinking about that week. It will also include a curation of articles I found, a bit of word nerdery, a few resources and prompts to think on, and (per usual) some laughs. Every other Monday, I’ll revise and republish a WILF essay over on Medium. Not just reposting it, but reshaping it. I’m seeing what changes when a little time and distance are applied. It’s a chance for me to dive even deeper into the thoughts that manifest a piece of writing. In between, I’m still writing. I share shorter insights and commentary over on Threads and Bluesky. Slightly longer pieces and writing prompts land on LinkedIn. Monthly I share BTF with a select few folks who’ve opted-in to get the “behind-the-scenes.” It’s all part of the same work: exploring how we write, why we write, and who we become when we do. For those of you who want to go deeper, a very small session of Become a Master Writer opens next week. I’m shifting the focus a bit there, too. It’s not a course about learning tricks or techniques to simply write better or get famous. It’s about honing the discipline, structure, and craft that allow you to become the writer you want to be. I’ll talk more about that soon. As summer hits, the next phase of the business should be live: new website, new offerings, a fully rebuilt writing workroom. But first, I think I need this. The writing. The rhythm. The return. See you Saturday, when I’ll be sharing what I learned about creepy old graveyards from Taylor Swift. What You Missed …Our writing has the same mission we do — to help you to make your writing even better. Here are a few of the WILF essays, revised and published on Medium (I’ll always include the free-to-read Friend Links here!)
Weekly Writing Tip …A quick chance to learn from the masters. “For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.” ― Neil deGrasse Tyson Bygone …Exquisite words from years gone by. Snerdle [SNUR-dll] (v.) – From the early 18th century, to snerdle means to curl up under the covers and snuggle in. Your choice whether you want to do that with a book or notebook and avoid the day. 😉 The etymology comes from Old English bī (near or around) + gān (to go or gone.) Sorta synonyms: hurkle-durkle, snuggle down, nestle This Week’s Writing Resource …Why not use the tools at your disposal? Marginalia Search — A search engine that prioritizes non-commercial results and sifts through lost websites with queries that aren’t optimized for SEO and billion-dollar corporation’s algorithms? YES PLEASE! For the Upcoming Week …Because we all need a good chuckle to start things off right! We’re quite PRO-RABBIT-HOLE around here. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa |