David Sedaris
Humorist and essayist, longtime New Yorker contributor
Where to hear and read about David Sedaris1 episode or test
David Sedaris is a humorist and essayist, a New Yorker contributor for more than 30 years and author of Me Talk Pretty One Day. The thing most worth learning from him is to log small real absurdities every day, then test the finished pieces on live audiences until they land.
They're my editor. They tell me everything I need to know.
The Secret Behind Decades of Daily Writing (David Sedaris Interview)
David Sedaris: the story and the lessons
1David Sedaris's long apprenticeship before the books
Sedaris wrote every day for 15 years before his first book. He kept a diary from age 20 and took his first writing class at 28. He has since sold more than 16 million books.
His conclusion is that you can get good, but you can't rush it.
He wrote and let publishing take care of itself. His one teacher told him to just write and the rest would follow. It sounded crazy, since how would anyone find him, but he believed it.
He never felt like a failure for having a day job. You're only good for so many hours a day, so why not have one?
He tells 20-year-olds that their twenties are for being bad. He says 20 is "your time to suck", a time to take chances and learn instead of trying to publish everything. On tour, most 20-year-olds ask him how to get published.
A young man nearly done with his first novel told him he wasn't worried about an agent. Sedaris finds that attitude rare.
Being himself, not a likable persona, became his living. His father tried to mold him into someone likable, starting with guitar lessons. Growing up gay, Sedaris hid behind a persona, and it never occurred to him that his real self could earn money.
He is 69 and says that coming out in high school would have meant military school or a conversion camp. He has been peeling off layers since.
He took big chances, moving to New York and then to Europe. The move to Europe meant leaving everything and starting over where he didn't speak the language.
He says he has never feared taking a chance, and that it has gotten him far.
2How Sedaris collects material
Sedaris keeps a diary guide of moments that might be useful later. He writes in his diary every morning. Anything that might come in handy also goes into a separate guide indexed by subject.
Under "t-shirt" alone he has 50 years of entries, including an airport shirt reading "I wasn't always a dick." Good material is loaded and can serve more than one essay.
The diary taught him what actually interests him. Early on he wrote for an imagined person who might find it. Over time he dropped that and wrote what he cared about.
For him that turned out to be small absurdities, not grand ones.
He uses the real detail because it beats anything he could invent. Chicken thighs abandoned among the potato chips, a doll's head in an airplane seat pocket and a fingernail left on a seat all came from real life.
Flights, subways and errands are full of material most people rush through. Phones and headphones make people miss it.
He keeps his scanners on and talks to strangers. He asks a CVS cashier about her nails and tells a flight attendant he noticed her new perfume. Noticing something new about a person opens a conversation.
He always has an exit strategy, and he says yes where others say no. That is why things happen to him. A post office trip in Alabama gave him a clerk with a Sir Lancelot haircut and an accent he had never heard.
Sedaris separates good characters from good people. He calls his father a horrible person and a good character, because in his mind his father was never wrong. His partner Hugh is a good character for the opposite reason: responsible and a little uptight.
Good characters set the temperature of the room, like thermostats, while compassionate people only reflect it, like thermometers. Characters with a distinct way of speaking are always good ones.
3How Sedaris builds an essay
He starts from a ridiculous collision between his mind and a place. At Anne Frank's house he caught himself mentally moving the kitchen of a fine triplex, as if apartment hunting in Paris. He thought that was ridiculous, and that was the essay.
The hard part was explaining that mindset without belittling her death, and it took time to get the tone right. Only two people ever complained.
A big question gives direction and real details give texture. His crow essay asks why some people feed wild animals and others don't. He fit in a real scene where his sister Amy started a rumor at a Dominican resort that Sting was staying nearby.
Voices, his German and a meow in a Saudi shop add sound that keeps a live audience awake.
Radio pushed him into true stories, because his fiction goes over the top. One of his stories has a woman shot 17 times in the neck. Radio required true stories, so he learned in public, which he compares to being a child actor.
Writing for the ear meant dropping the topic sentence and opening on something like a doughnut shop, where you can't guess the ending.
He keeps the cast small and sketches speakers in one stroke. He thinks of the listener's mind as a stage, and every name fills it. Someone who adds nothing memorable stays off, even if they were at the dinner.
For a character who speaks, one detail is enough: a mustache, a unibrow, a little star over a pimple. Friends sometimes complain they weren't mentioned.
He chooses exact nouns and plain, sound-right words. His litter-picking paragraph names a chip bag in a tree, a mitten "caught in the embrace of a blackberry bush" and a matchbook in a ditch. His first drafts say "a bag", and revision adds the specifics.
He says never look like you reached for a thesaurus, and calls adverbs the mark of an amateur. Lazy dialect like "gonna" gives the writer away too.
He learned that straining for laughs makes writing ring false. His early books nudged readers in the ribs, asking whether they got it. He later trusted that people who aren't laughing are still listening.
He plants small setups that only pay off if listeners were paying attention, so the later laugh is the proof. He won't become a Macy's elf again, because it would be artificial.
He checks whether a story is only interesting to him. Twelve hours stuck at O'Hare felt like the end of the world to him, but told aloud it was boring.
He says that if you're boring someone you can tell, as long as you pay attention. Something happening to you doesn't make it interesting.
4How Sedaris revises and tests pieces on live audiences
Sedaris treats a paying audience as his editor. He reads new essays on tour for weeks and feels when listeners laugh, cough, drift or look puzzled. Reading aloud also exposes repeated words, like "lunch" twice in a row.
A Blue Jays line he improvised in a Q&A became the biggest laugh in his essay, and he doubts he would have found it at his desk. A friend like Hugh tolerates only about a paragraph.
He gives his editor the 15th draft, not the third. He expects about 17 drafts in total and would rather do two more rounds with his New Yorker editor than make her read an early one.
Having worked the piece hard alone, he can defend what matters, such as the biggest laugh in it.
He wants an ending that lands once, like a plane. A good ending is smooth, makes sense, may come full circle and arrives unseen. An essay with four endings ends four times before it ends.
A fitness-center essay ending on a quiet kitchen moment with Hugh drew an "oh" from the audience, and Sedaris choked up reading it. If he has to tamp down his papers to show he's done, the ending failed.
He refuses to end by repeating what he already said. He hates the five-paragraph formula of saying what you'll say, saying it, then saying what you said. His reaction is that the reader didn't just walk into the room.
He ends on something new: a laugh, a surprise or a thought. He plans a show by the sound each piece ends on.
He paces spoken pieces on index cards and hides his pages. A best man who used about 25 note cards, each a full story, got laughs on roughly 70% of them. A stack of pages makes listeners start counting down.
He also says to dress up and rehearse, because it respects the audience and shows the piece mattered to you.
5What Sedaris says about learning to write and getting feedback
He says reading is how you stop being an amateur. Books that weren't about writing taught him what the inside of a book looks like. He taught in Chicago without graduate school.
He says retirees who expect a book by February insult the craft. A writer who wants readers should read other people's books too.
He distrusts friends as judges of his work. Friends are nice and supportive, so their praise tells you little, and most of them don't read.
A writer has to invite the reader, engage them and entertain them. He also never sends unsolicited writing to a stranger, because you can't know how much criticism they can take.
He stays with what he actually did, not staged adventures. His essays come from things he simply did, like feeding crows, and he would not repeat a stunt just to get material.
He says you eventually accept who you are and make the best of it.
Flannery O'Connor and Mavis Gallant shaped his taste for comedy. He loves them for comedy that critics overlook, and says they made him fall out laughing, not chuckle politely.
He cites O'Connor's view that anyone who survived childhood has enough material for life. Gallant was a Canadian in Paris who seemed to be in The New Yorker every week in the 70s.
The Secret Behind Decades of Daily Writing (David Sedaris Interview)
David Sedaris explains how decades of daily diary writing, close observation and reading drafts aloud to live audiences shape his funny, specific essays. The habit worth hearing is his diary guide, which turns small absurd moments into material, paired with treating a live crowd as his editor.
Sedaris wrote every day for 15 years before his first book. He kept a diary from age 20 and took his first writing class at 28. He has since sold more than 16 million books.
His conclusion is that you can get good, but you can't rush it.
He wrote and let publishing take care of itself. His one teacher told him to just write and the rest would follow. It sounded crazy, since how would anyone find him, but he believed it.
He never felt like a failure for having a day job. You're only good for so many hours a day, so why not have one?
He tells 20-year-olds that their twenties are for being bad. He says 20 is "your time to suck", a time to take chances and learn instead of trying to publish everything. On tour, most 20-year-olds ask him how to get published.
A young man nearly done with his first novel told him he wasn't worried about an agent. Sedaris finds that attitude rare.
Being himself, not a likable persona, became his living. His father tried to mold him into someone likable, starting with guitar lessons. Growing up gay, Sedaris hid behind a persona, and it never occurred to him that his real self could earn money.
He is 69 and says that coming out in high school would have meant military school or a conversion camp. He has been peeling off layers since.
He took big chances, moving to New York and then to Europe. The move to Europe meant leaving everything and starting over where he didn't speak the language.
He says he has never feared taking a chance, and that it has gotten him far.
Sedaris keeps a diary guide of moments that might be useful later. He writes in his diary every morning. Anything that might come in handy also goes into a separate guide indexed by subject.
Under "t-shirt" alone he has 50 years of entries, including an airport shirt reading "I wasn't always a dick." Good material is loaded and can serve more than one essay.
The diary taught him what actually interests him. Early on he wrote for an imagined person who might find it. Over time he dropped that and wrote what he cared about.
For him that turned out to be small absurdities, not grand ones.
He uses the real detail because it beats anything he could invent. Chicken thighs abandoned among the potato chips, a doll's head in an airplane seat pocket and a fingernail left on a seat all came from real life.
Flights, subways and errands are full of material most people rush through. Phones and headphones make people miss it.
He keeps his scanners on and talks to strangers. He asks a CVS cashier about her nails and tells a flight attendant he noticed her new perfume. Noticing something new about a person opens a conversation.
He always has an exit strategy, and he says yes where others say no. That is why things happen to him. A post office trip in Alabama gave him a clerk with a Sir Lancelot haircut and an accent he had never heard.
Sedaris separates good characters from good people. He calls his father a horrible person and a good character, because in his mind his father was never wrong. His partner Hugh is a good character for the opposite reason: responsible and a little uptight.
Good characters set the temperature of the room, like thermostats, while compassionate people only reflect it, like thermometers. Characters with a distinct way of speaking are always good ones.
He starts from a ridiculous collision between his mind and a place. At Anne Frank's house he caught himself mentally moving the kitchen of a fine triplex, as if apartment hunting in Paris. He thought that was ridiculous, and that was the essay.
The hard part was explaining that mindset without belittling her death, and it took time to get the tone right. Only two people ever complained.
A big question gives direction and real details give texture. His crow essay asks why some people feed wild animals and others don't. He fit in a real scene where his sister Amy started a rumor at a Dominican resort that Sting was staying nearby.
Voices, his German and a meow in a Saudi shop add sound that keeps a live audience awake.
Radio pushed him into true stories, because his fiction goes over the top. One of his stories has a woman shot 17 times in the neck. Radio required true stories, so he learned in public, which he compares to being a child actor.
Writing for the ear meant dropping the topic sentence and opening on something like a doughnut shop, where you can't guess the ending.
He keeps the cast small and sketches speakers in one stroke. He thinks of the listener's mind as a stage, and every name fills it. Someone who adds nothing memorable stays off, even if they were at the dinner.
For a character who speaks, one detail is enough: a mustache, a unibrow, a little star over a pimple. Friends sometimes complain they weren't mentioned.
He chooses exact nouns and plain, sound-right words. His litter-picking paragraph names a chip bag in a tree, a mitten "caught in the embrace of a blackberry bush" and a matchbook in a ditch. His first drafts say "a bag", and revision adds the specifics.
He says never look like you reached for a thesaurus, and calls adverbs the mark of an amateur. Lazy dialect like "gonna" gives the writer away too.
He learned that straining for laughs makes writing ring false. His early books nudged readers in the ribs, asking whether they got it. He later trusted that people who aren't laughing are still listening.
He plants small setups that only pay off if listeners were paying attention, so the later laugh is the proof. He won't become a Macy's elf again, because it would be artificial.
He checks whether a story is only interesting to him. Twelve hours stuck at O'Hare felt like the end of the world to him, but told aloud it was boring.
He says that if you're boring someone you can tell, as long as you pay attention. Something happening to you doesn't make it interesting.
Sedaris treats a paying audience as his editor. He reads new essays on tour for weeks and feels when listeners laugh, cough, drift or look puzzled. Reading aloud also exposes repeated words, like "lunch" twice in a row.
A Blue Jays line he improvised in a Q&A became the biggest laugh in his essay, and he doubts he would have found it at his desk. A friend like Hugh tolerates only about a paragraph.
He gives his editor the 15th draft, not the third. He expects about 17 drafts in total and would rather do two more rounds with his New Yorker editor than make her read an early one.
Having worked the piece hard alone, he can defend what matters, such as the biggest laugh in it.
He wants an ending that lands once, like a plane. A good ending is smooth, makes sense, may come full circle and arrives unseen. An essay with four endings ends four times before it ends.
A fitness-center essay ending on a quiet kitchen moment with Hugh drew an "oh" from the audience, and Sedaris choked up reading it. If he has to tamp down his papers to show he's done, the ending failed.
He refuses to end by repeating what he already said. He hates the five-paragraph formula of saying what you'll say, saying it, then saying what you said. His reaction is that the reader didn't just walk into the room.
He ends on something new: a laugh, a surprise or a thought. He plans a show by the sound each piece ends on.
He paces spoken pieces on index cards and hides his pages. A best man who used about 25 note cards, each a full story, got laughs on roughly 70% of them. A stack of pages makes listeners start counting down.
He also says to dress up and rehearse, because it respects the audience and shows the piece mattered to you.
He says reading is how you stop being an amateur. Books that weren't about writing taught him what the inside of a book looks like. He taught in Chicago without graduate school.
He says retirees who expect a book by February insult the craft. A writer who wants readers should read other people's books too.
He distrusts friends as judges of his work. Friends are nice and supportive, so their praise tells you little, and most of them don't read.
A writer has to invite the reader, engage them and entertain them. He also never sends unsolicited writing to a stranger, because you can't know how much criticism they can take.
He stays with what he actually did, not staged adventures. His essays come from things he simply did, like feeding crows, and he would not repeat a stunt just to get material.
He says you eventually accept who you are and make the best of it.
Flannery O'Connor and Mavis Gallant shaped his taste for comedy. He loves them for comedy that critics overlook, and says they made him fall out laughing, not chuckle politely.
He cites O'Connor's view that anyone who survived childhood has enough material for life. Gallant was a Canadian in Paris who seemed to be in The New Yorker every week in the 70s.