* "Flip over the rock in your mind, type about the beetles."

* "The self-honesty required here isn’t a one-time thing, it’s an ongoing process.* 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 actually become, or you slowly descend into a hollow parody of what you once were."

* "I find that people often believe they have a writing technique problem, when, actually, what they have is a sincerity problem."

Your mind is constantly moving. You’re always producing judgments, attitudes, opinions, emotions, melancholy, malaise, anger, and so on. You have things to write about. What you do is just put the things in your head on the page, in basically the order they naturally occur. Flip over the rock in your mind, type about the beetles.

If you don’t want t... See more

* "Sometimes, to be a resident of polite society, you have to lie, and this feels unpleasant for a moment but is usually bearable. But lying to an empty page alone in a room feels awful."

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.

Perhaps you’ve complained before that you don’t have anything to write about. That your “mind has gone blank,” that you don’t have any ideas.

I don’t believe you. I know that you have mental contents, right? Your mind is constantly moving. You’re always producing judgments, attitudes, opinions, emotions, melancholy, malaise, anger, and so on. You h... See more

* "[Writing] should feel like work rather than labor."

* "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."