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You have some tricks.

You’re a magazine writer, after all—you have to write a lot of different kinds of stories, and sometimes tricks are what gets you to the end of them. Feeling too prissily self-conscious about the quality of your prose? Curse your f-ing head off, then remove all the blue language before you hand in the story. Feeling your story becoming impersonal? Write it as a letter to your editor, the way Tom Wolfe wrote “The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Baby,” or better yet, write it as a letter to the person you’re writing about. The story needs to be in the third-person? Write stretches of it in the first, and then do the opposite when the story is supposed to be first-person in the first place. Oh, you’ve got a million of them, because if there’s anything you’ve learned from your decades writing for magazines, it’s this: tricks work. They break up logjams.…