This is an edited excerpt from my November 2025 newsletter, The Writing Life. (Subscribe here.)

You can also listen to it on my Living the Writing Life podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

I have decided (for reasons I’ll explain shortly) to make “adaptability” my word of the month. (And I just realized that using the word “make” indicates a sense of control, which can be in conflict with being adaptable.)

But first, let’s define it. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, adaptability i...