- Just as my personality is shaped by the people I spend the most time with, my writing is shaped by the authors I read the most of.
- “busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge.” - https://jasmine.substack.com/p/zephyr
- Great writers seem to use the writing process as a springboard for inspiration, rather than letting existing ideas predetermine their trail of thought.
- “Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that’s the truth…we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald
- There’s a delicate balance between taking time for writing and experiencing things worth writing about.
- All writing conveys information within a spectrum of efficiency. “I write like the 12 dollar desk salad, the bar that packs 20 grams of protein and plastic into one 200-calorie brick. But good writing, like a good meal, needs fat. It should indulge readers, is meant to be chewed and enjoyed, affording a generous escape from the prosaic and mundane.” -https://sublime.app/card/audience-of-one-b606?contentType=highlights
- “Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn’t know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won’t just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that’s why I write them.” https://www.paulgraham.com/words.html
- The best writers throw away most of their words. Writing is an iterative process, and the first draft is almost never the best draft.
- Write down things at the speed of thought. Saving then recalling from long-term memory is spotty and high-effort.
- Not all writing should be read or structured linearly. Often, pieces online branch off into links, grab attention from large headlines/photos, and expect readers to backtrack and sidetrack based on their attention.