As the year winds down, I find myself rereading margins, editorial letters, and revision notes—not to tally word counts or deadlines met, but to notice patterns. When you work closely with hundreds of manuscripts across genres, something interesting happens: individual stories begin to echo one another. Not in plot or voice, but in struggle. In hesitation. In the same questions writers quietly ask between drafts.

This year reminded me that storytelling is less about mastering a set of rules and more about learning how to listen—both to the work on the page and to yourself as a writer. Across novels, memoirs, essays, and nonfiction projects, a few lessons surfaced again and again. These are the insights I’m carrying forward into the next year, and the ones I hope writers will take with them too.

Every holiday season reminds me that family gatherings exist for two reasons: food, and unintentionally gifting writers enough story material to last until next December (ha). But seriously, if you’re a writer attending a holiday gathering and you aren’t mentally filing material away for your next book, are you even doing the holidays right?  

​The holiday season has a way of heightening everything—joy, nostalgia, tension, longing, unresolved conflict, even the quiet griefs that typically stay tucked beneath the routines of daily life. Whether you’re writing fiction or memoir, December’s sparkle-and-shadow combination offers an irresistible creative entry point into family drama. People are gathering. Traditions return. Old wounds test their bandages. And amid the glow of twinkle lights, characters (including ourselves) often reveal who they are with startling clarity.