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" To me, having 'material' for an essay means not only having something to write about but also having something interesting and original to say about whatever that might be. "
Meghan Daum
Say
Interesting
Me
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" I work really hard not to have a kitsch tone to any of my work, particularly radio stuff, which sometimes goes in that direction on certain programs. "
Meghan Daum
Sometimes
Direction
Hard
" Our culture is so obsessed with the idea that you're going to go through a crisis or some difficult event and come out the other side a changed or improved person, and I just think that if you're honest, that often does not happen, and in fact, it shouldn't happen. "
Meghan Daum
You
Crisis
Go
" I am weary of happiness, both as a word and as a concept. "
Meghan Daum
Weary
Concept
Happiness
" Confessions are not processed or analysed; they're told in a moment of desperation to a priest or to somebody interrogating you about a crime. "
Meghan Daum
Priest
You
Crime
" Writers are the ones who figure out how to put their observations into words. "
Meghan Daum
How
Words
Who
" I loved 'About Schmidt'. I like Alexander Payne's work a lot. "
Meghan Daum
Like
Work
Loved
" It is important for children to grow up in a world where there are all kinds of adults and role models around them, for them to know it's not just parents and people who are parents that care about them, but that there are people who are living other kinds of lives. "
Meghan Daum
Care
World
People
" I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in. "
Meghan Daum
Genre
Work
Love
" Though I probably shouldn't admit this, the activities and pursuits in which I've achieved any measure of success are, without exception, activities and pursuits that came easily to me from the beginning. "
Meghan Daum
Success
Measure
Me
" Just as I never liked bumper stickers - even though I do brake for animals, and if I had a kid, she would definitely be an honor student - I don't like the idea of expressing my views through social-media-controlled rainbow-or-anything-else-ification. "
Meghan Daum
Animals
Honor
Kid
" Checking email every 45 seconds is not only compulsive, it's presumptuous. It suggests a belief that anyone who sends us a message needs us to read it immediately, even if the message is from SkyMall telling us our Bigfoot Garden Yeti statue has shipped. "
Meghan Daum
Email
Us
Message
" The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It's not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it's to challenge people, and it's to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things. "
Meghan Daum
Writing
Think
Tell
" Handwriting challenges aside, I love paper cards. I love the endless stewing involved in picking them out at the store. I love buying holiday stamps at the post office, and I love that 'whoosh' sound the cards make when I drop them into the mail slot. "
Meghan Daum
Challenges
Office
Holiday
" I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do. "
Meghan Daum
Off
Short
Started
" Each year, in my quaint efforts to send out paper holiday cards with personal messages, I probably discard one for every three I actually manage to put in the mail. The reason is that my handwriting is now less legible than it was when I was in the second grade. "
Meghan Daum
Three
Cards
Now
" What I think is important about essayists - about the essay, as opposed to a lot of personal writing that kind of finds its way into public view - is that the material really has to be presented in a processed way. "
Meghan Daum
Kind
Think
Important
" Of the countless ways to feel old in your 40s, perhaps none is quite as perplexing as seeing a young person trendily decked out in 1980s-style garb and saying to yourself, 'I can't believe that look is back in style. It was bad enough the first time around!' "
Meghan Daum
Yourself
Style
Believe
" It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I'd been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining. "
Meghan Daum
Moving
Me
Challenge
" There's a particular kind of single woman whose relationship with her dog has a level of intensity and affection that may be both the cause and the result of her singleness. For a long time, I was that woman. "
Meghan Daum
Dog
Time
Relationship
" Almost nothing is more tedious than complaining about the weather. "
Meghan Daum
Complaining
Weather
More
" L.A. is a constellation of microclimates and microcosms, a library with dozens of special collections. A 20-minute drive can bring a temperature change of 15 degrees. Crossing an intersection can feel like crossing a national border. "
Meghan Daum
Feel
Library
Drive
" The right way to win is to recognize that winning isn't the end game, but rather the beginning of new opportunities - maybe even opportunities to help other people win. "
Meghan Daum
Beginning
Win
People
" Few targets of ridicule are as easy to hit as owners and handlers of competitive show dogs. "
Meghan Daum
Competitive
Ridicule
Show
" People who choose not to have kids do so because they respect the job of parenting so much that they know not to take it on if they know it's not something that they're up for, and I don't know what to be a bigger tribute to parenting than that. "
Meghan Daum
Respect
Job
Parenting
" The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world. "
Meghan Daum
People
Culture
Live
" I always tell writers that it's good to have an area of expertise. It's a really practical answer, I know, but know about science or about sports or about medicine, so you can work as a science writer or a sports writer. Don't just know about yourself. "
Meghan Daum
Yourself
Science
Work
" Quitting Facebook would be like partially erasing myself. Quitting Twitter would constitute further erasure. Pretty soon, I'd be invisible. I was never on Instagram or Tumblr, which I guess means I never completely existed in the first place. "
Meghan Daum
Pretty
Invisible
Myself
" I think people seem to want to read pieces that are shorter but not as short as the pieces they can read in small bites on the Internet. It may be that the sort of long essays are hitting a sweet spot between the tiny morsels online and the full-length book. "
Meghan Daum
Book
Small
Short
" I have bougainvillea and a magnolia tree outside my window. Not that anything will ever beat the view I had from my desk window in my little farmhouse in Nebraska. Just a dirt road stretching out as far as you could see, with prairie grass on either side. "
Meghan Daum
Road
View
Tree
" People have always taken photos of themselves, either with camera timers or by handing their Nikons over to strangers in foreign countries and then paying large sums to get them back. "
Meghan Daum
Always
Camera
Strangers