I was born in Los Angeles in 1966 to a British mother and an American father. They met on an airplane in 1963 when she was a Pan Am stewardess and he was coming back from participating in the first American expedition to Mount Everest.

I don’t remember L.A. By the time I was eight I had also lived in St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands, and in London. I lived in coastal Massachusetts until college at Indiana University, where I earned a B.A. in Mandarin and French, having spent my junior year (1985-86) in Beijing. After getting an M.A. in Chinese Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), I worked for the U.S. Commerce Department for a year, wondering about joining the Foreign Service. I got married and moved to Japan in 1991 instead.

It was there that I started really concentrating on writing. While earning money at various jobs (editor, voice-over talent), I submitted freelance articles on business, culture and history to magazines and newspapers; I scribbled poetry; I wrote three novels. Lots of my articles were published, as was one poem. Please forget I told you about the novels.

After eight years and two babies in Japan, I moved to Singapore. During my seventeen years there I got divorced, developed a successful coaching and training business, adopted a schnauzer, met the love of my life and remarried, and began writing for a living.

In June 2016 I moved to England. I plan to stay.

On Writing

When I go to a writer’s website, I'm looking for information on why they believe they write, and how they go about writing. If you’re like me, then, this is for you.

I don’t think it’s unusual for people who move a lot in their life – and especially those who move to such diverse places as I have – to feel a desire to write about what they observe. We have to become very adaptable, very elastic, and we have to keep learning new things. We like to set these things down.

But so do writers who don’t move at all.

Writing has more to do with curiosity than with moving, doesn't it? Look what happened, writers think. Feel what happened. Why did it happen?

If you want your children to write, make these questions the basis of dinner-table conversation.

That’s what growing up in my family was like. My parents were insatiably curious. My father was a psychologist (a whole profession built around the question Why did it happen?) and jazz musician (more of a Look what happened! sort of occupation). He wrote the definitive biography of the virtuoso jazz piano player Art Tatum once he retired, and was still researching his many interests when he died at 82.

My mother, Valerie Lester, pursued hers until mere months before her death as well. She was the author of the history Fasten Your Seatbelts: History and Heroism in the Pan Am Cabin and three biographies: Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens; Giambattista Bodoni: His Life and His World; and Marvels: The Life of Clarence Bicknell, Botanist, Archaeologist, Artist. She also translated the Vintage Classics edition of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, and penned the historical novel The West Indian, set in 18th-century Jamaica.

My brother, Toby Lester, formerly an Atlantic Monthly editor, is the author of The Fourth Part Of The World, about the 1507 world map that was the first to refer to the newly discovered landmass as America. He also wrote Da Vinci’s Ghost, which asks why Leonardo’s drawing of Vitruvian Man has become one of the most widely recognized images in the world.

Look what happened. Why did it happen?

Other questions I ask myself, both in life and in writing, are What have I got? and What do I need? These are the questions that helped me the most during the dozen or so years I spent performing improvised comedy. Practicing improvisation had a huge impact on how much I trusted my brain. If you worry about what your brain is throwing up for you to catch, then you’re in danger of self-censorship, and of missing a wonderful idea. Your brain will come up with a natural recommendation when you’re stuck, based on its particular take on what needs to happen given what has gone before. Improvisers, and writers, trip up when they discard their natural inclinations and make an effort to be clever.

Keith Johnstone put it best, in his book Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre:

“The improviser has to realize that the more obvious he is, the more original he appears…. Ordinary people asked to improvise will search for some ‘original’ idea because they want to be thought clever…. No two people are exactly alike, and the more obvious an improviser is, the more himself he appears. An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He’s not making any decisions; he’s not weighing one idea against another. He’s accepting his first thoughts…. Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre.”

In 2010, I did a talk called ‘Stories on the Spot’ at a TEDxSingapore event. If you have time to watch it (11 minutes), you’ll hear about how important I feel it is to reframe what ‘the box’ is when we’re asked to think outside it, and will learn a wonderful exercise that improvisers use to increase their mental agility, trust their ideas, and have a rocking good time. You’ll see me assessing what I need on the spot, making links that would be impossible if I let myself worry about what was happening, or might happen.

For any writer experiencing writer’s block, I’d highly recommend signing up for an improv workshop. It’s hard. You’ll come up against your concerns pretty quickly. I certainly did when I started. I wanted to be able to do it so badly that I’d hit a wall in the middle of a scene, and sometimes I’d even cry. Doing comedy! Eventually I learned how to get out of my brain’s way, because it had amazing responses when I stopped trying to be clever and stopped pushing myself so hard. Now, when I sit down at my desk because it’s time to write, and things are quiet in my head, I know that something is happening and it will make itself known when it is ready. I wait. Things float to the surface when I don’t churn up the water with worry. Maybe the idea that comes along will be something that I’ll end up cutting later. So be it. Maybe it’s just a piece of scaffolding, and can be taken down when the structure is sound. 

I don’t write in fancy notebooks. I figured out pretty early on that expensive notebooks were intimidating, and I couldn’t bear the look of my penmanship in them, let alone the words I was writing. I keep the ante low. I have often written in exercise books, on scrap paper and used envelopes. For me, the pen is more important than the paper. Sometimes I type, but lately I’ve been writing mostly by hand, as much with my left as with my dominant right. It calms me to use a pen, and to use my opposite hand. My thoughts flow more smoothly. The more I relax, the more I write; the more I write, the more likely I am to get from What do I need? to Look what happened.

I've been writing essays on communication since 2006. I used to send them only to my coaching clients and friends, but in 2010 I turned them into a blog and self-published the first 51. I called them Restroom Reflections, and the collection is available here.