By contrast, when you’re in touch with your honest aesthetic/spiritual/material/intellectual priorities, writing is pretty easy. I don’t mean, like, that it’s easy to write immortal masterpieces—there are heights of aesthetic perfection that can only be reached when the right material meets a well-trained set of hands. But writing a decent enough f... See more

I find that this is an overlooked source of writing difficulty. I find that people often believe they have a writing technique problem, when, actually, what they have is a sincerity problem. They think that writing is onerous, when, actually, they mean that writing as if they’re someone else is onerous. If you’re not the kind of person who actually... See more

The self-honesty required here isn’t a one-time thing, it’s an ongoing process. As you continue producing creative work, you will, for better or worse, be changing in the background. You may find that doing the things you once did is no longer congruent with your inner climate. This gives you, roughly, two choices—either you flow with who you’ve ac... See more

And maybe the thing you write will be a crock of shit. But you won’t know unless you can bear to put it down. And if you can’t even type it—forget about publishing it, we’re just talking about the initial keyboard action—that means that you don’t want to know yourself.