Thank you
, , , , and the 50+ of you who joined us live on Zoom today. This post is free until June 30, 2025. is one of the sharpest and wisest women I know. She has crafted her life and her books by being fully Abby Thomas—raw, honest, curious. There’s a lot of creative wisdom packed into today’s “Three Things” conversation and I hope it encourages you to write more, worry less, and stay in the moment.The next “Three Things” conversation will be on Substack Live on July 25, 2025 at 12:00 pm PT with
, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. Subscribe if you’d like to be notified of when we go live.Here’s what we discussed
These short prose pieces are shared in their entirety and reprinted with permission of the author.
“Apple Cake” (175 words) from Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life (8:52)
“Yesterday” (115 words) from Abby’s Substack, What Comes Next (27:31)
“These Dogs I Love” (393 words) from her latest collection of micro memoirs/micro essays, Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing (49:09)
On Finding Your Voice at 48. Abby didn’t start writing seriously until she was 48, after attending a workshop led by Bill Roorbach in New Hampshire. The key insight that freed her was his comment on “Zen mind, beginner’s mind,” about embracing being a beginner rather than trying to be an expert.
“I hadn’t gone to college. I got kicked out for being pregnant early in the freshman year. So I didn’t know any of the rules of writing, thank God, because then I think I would never have done it.”
The Power of Leaving Things Out. We examined her stunning 175-word piece “Apple Cake” from Safekeeping, which demonstrates how a story about a life can be contained in just a few sentences. No heavy backstory, no elaborate detail, just simple sentences.
“For me, the less I explain or go into detail, the happier I am. What you leave out is as important as what you put in.”
Writing from Curiosity. Abby writes from a place of genuine curiosity about seemingly insignificant moments.
“Why am I so interested in an ant on my bookcase? Why do I keep staring at this one winged wasp on the cuff of my sleeve? The less significant it is, the more interesting it is to write about because if you stick with it, you do finally know why.”
On Not Knowing Where You’re Going. She trusts her subconscious completely.
“If you’re made curious by something that makes absolutely no sense, trust the back of your mind. There’s a reason for it.”
On Memory and Living in the Moment. At 83, Abby considers her imperfect memory an advantage, especially when it comes to writing memoir.
“I think total recall would be the worst thing at all. I’m in the moment and the moment is where I live and everything, there’s worlds in every moment... You don’t have to practice Buddhism to live in the moment. You just live in the moment.”
On the Value of Writing Daily aka Filling the Pantry. Abby encourages writers to think of a daily writing practice as gathering ingredients for future work, even if your writing doesn’t currently “succeed” or work.
“And I like doing it for 10 minutes because I did it. Because even if it doesn't work, you have a larder, you have ingredients, and then you can put that together to bake the cake or whatever it is you're going to make out of it.”
On Deadlines. She never writes to contract, preferring to write first and see what emerges.
“I just write and then see if it turns into anything.”
On Organizing a Collection of Work. A lot of things fall naturally into three sections so she recommends using it as an organizing principle.
“The hardest part about this book was putting it together...my friend Chuck and my youngest daughter and I divided it into three sections…and we put them on the floor like a game of solitaire. And then we move things around.”
On Aging. This is one of the best perspectives on aging and memory.
“It’s wonderful to be old. I can just tell everybody that. Because you don’t have to practice Buddhism to live in the moment. You just live in the moment. And at first it was scary when I discovered that I didn’t remember anything of yesterday and I had just shreds left of the morning. But I got over that.”
You heard it here first: from Abby’s mouth to our ears
“You don’t fuck with the muse. So I just kept going.”
“I find that if you leave it alone and go back to it, once you’ve forgotten you wrote it, or if you print it out in a different font so it doesn’t look as though you wrote it, it’s easier to make things go away that don’t need to be there.”
“If you pay enough attention to doing nothing, the back of your mind will creep under the door that’s locked from the inside and make its way to the front. And then you know what it is you’ve been thinking about. And that’s when you start writing.”
“When I’m finished with something, or it feels finished ... I go back and see what I can cut. I cut it down to the bone.”
“If things are coming at you and you don’t know why, write them down. Keep them because you’ll figure out why. You’ll figure out why and if you don’t, you’ve had a good time recording odds and ends of things.”
Now it’s your turn
Abby is generously providing a writing tip and a prompt to help us continue the conversation:
Writing Tip: Read your work out loud to yourself. If your voice goes dead, either there is something hiding behind that paragraph or sentence, something you don’t want to admit, or it’s just plain boring. If there is something you don’t want to know about yourself, let alone expose, you need to write it. The hidden stuff gets all of its power from the dark. The more vulnerable you allow yourself to be, the stronger you become. Don’t skip over it.
Writing Prompt: The 3-Word Sentence. This assignment popped into my head as I was crossing 110th Street walking down Broadway. In the city, when I lived there.
Take any ten years of your life, reduce them to two pages, and every sentence has to be three words long. Not four, not two, three words long. They can be fragments, but not when read together make a sentence. You can’t do “I went out. to the store.”
There were two I never forgot, written in the 80’s in my workshop in the city. There was this one: “He was cute. I was clueless. It seemed right.” The interesting thing about this assignment is that there was plenty of love and divorce and children. But there were also others like “Slept on grass.” and “Sounds of water.” The thing is, you have nowhere to hide behind a three-word sentence. You can’t be invisible behind a sapling. People said that after doing this one, they began to think and talk in three-word sentences. It was contagious.
Share your 3-word sentence piece in the comments and/or your response to our conversation and we’ll do our best to respond. Thank you again for joining us!
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