Five Lessons in Writing from David Sedaris
Lessons from David Sedaris’s Masterclass on storytelling and humor, and the essay it produced.
I love David Sedaris. He’s so catty, self-deprecating and honest that I could listen to him all day. In fact, I do listen to everything he produces on Audible, where he reads his own work.
Theft by Finding, the 40-years of diaries he published in 2017, provide one of the most useful insights into what it means to be a writer. You can see how Sedaris constantly engages in the world, observes it, and most importantly records his thoughts and experiences in text. It’s also comforting to follow his journey as a writer; The New Yorker writer who has sold over 12 million books in print, only graduated from art school after the age of thirty. And even when he was being reviewed by big publications, he was still taking on cleaning and odd jobs. The path is seldom straight or easy, and Sedaris shows how everything in life can be used in writing.
You’re so privileged to be a writer. Normal people, something bad happens to them, and there’s nothing they can do with it except feel bad, or complain, or press charges — David Sedaris
With that in mind, here are some great lessons from from David Sedaris’s Masterclass on storytelling and humor.
