“ Still Writing offers up a cornucopia of wisdom, insights, and practical lessons gleaned from Dani Shapiro's long experience as a celebrated writer and teacher of writing. The beneficiaries are beginning writers, veteran writers and everyone in between.”—Jennifer Egan From Dani Shapiro, bestselling author of Devotion and Slow Motion , comes a witty, heartfelt, and practical look at the exhilarating and challenging process of storytelling. At once a memoir, a meditation on the artistic process, and advice on craft, Still Writing is an intimate companion to living a creative life. Writers—and anyone with an artistic temperament—will find inspiration and comfort in these pages. Offering lessons learned over twenty years of teaching and writing, Shapiro shares her own revealing insights to weave an indispensable almanac for modern writers. Dani Shapiro is the author of eleven books, and the host and creator of the hit podcast Family Secrets . Her most recent novel, Signal Fires, was named a best book of 2022 by Time Magazine , Washington Post , Amazon , and others, and is a national bestseller. Her most recent memoir, Inheritance , was an instant New York Times Bestseller, and named a best book of 2019 by Elle , Vanity Fair , Wired , and Real Simple . Dani’s work has been published in fourteen languages and she’s currently developing Signal Fires for its television adaptation. Dani’s book on the process and craft of writing, Still Writing , is being reissued on the occasion of its tenth anniversary in 2023. She occasionally teaches workshops and retreats, and is the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. Scars I grew up the only child of older parents. If I were to give you a list of all the facts of my early life that made me a writer, this one would be near the top. Only child. Older parents. It now seems almost like a job requirement––though back then, I wished it to be otherwise. A lonely, isolated childhood isn’t a prerequisite for a writing life, but it certainly helped. My parents were observant Jews. We kept a Kosher home, and didn’t drive on the Sabbath, from sundown on Friday evening until sundown on Saturday. We didn’t turn on lights, or the radio, or television. I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike, or play the piano. Or do homework. This left me with a lot of time to do nothing. (Time to do nothing, by the way, is also very useful though boring training for the life of the writer.) Most Saturday mornings, I walked a half-mile to synagogue with my father while my mother stayed home with a sinus headache. Our house was silent and spotless. Dirt, smudges, noise––any kind of disarray would have been unthinkably dangerous. Housekeepers were always quitting. No one could keep the house to my mother's standards. Every surface gleamed. Picture frames were dusted daily. Sheets and pillowcases were ironed three times a week. My drawers were color-coordinated, blue Danskin tops perfectly folded next to blue Danskin bottoms. The exterminator came monthly. The toxic mold guy made biannual visits. Summers, the lawn man came with his mower and hedge trimmer, keeping every bit of our suburban New Jersey acre under control. Control was important. It wasn't really the messiness of life that we were girding ourselves against. Secrets floated through our home like dust motes in the air. Every word spoken by my parents contained within it a hidden hard kernel of what wasn't being said. Though I couldn't have expressed it, I knew with a child's instincts that life itself was seen by both my parents as a teeming, seething, frightful hall of mirrors. Something had made them scared. They tried to protect me from themselves, from their own histories––der kinder, one of them would whisper harshly and they'd stop talking after I entered the room. I loved my parents, but I didn't want to be like them. I didn’t want to be afraid of life. The trouble was, it was all I knew. And so I spent my childhood straining to hear. With no siblings to distract me, I had plenty of time on my hands, and eavesdropped and snooped in every way I could devise. I lurked outside doorways, crouched on staircase landings. I fiddled with the intercom system in our house, attempting to tune into rooms where one or both of my parents might be. I riffled through filing cabinets when my parents were out to dinner and the babysitter was downstairs watching "The Partridge Family". I haunted my mother's closets, the cashmere sweaters in individual plastic garment bags, the shoes and purses in their original boxes. What was I hoping to find? A clue. A reason. We had two telephone lines, and one of them had a little doohicky that you could lift up, preventing anyone from picking up another extension and listening in. I noticed that whenever my mother was on the phone, she used this doohicky. What was she saying that I wasn’t meant to hear? I didn't know that this spying was the beginning of my literary education.