Several Short Sentences About Writing

The reader’s experience of your prose has nothing to do with how hard or easy it was for you to make. You’re not writing for a reader in the mirror whose psychological state reflects your own. You have only your own working world to consider. The reader reads in another world entirely.

Concentration, attention, excitement, will be part of your working state. Daily. Flow, inspiration—the spontaneous emission of sentences—will not. That distinction is worth keeping in mind.

At first, what you mean to say will emerge By setting aside the things you don’t mean to say As well as trying to say the thing itself. Learning to do this will take some time.

Revision is the writer’s reading,

“How will I know when to stop revising?” You may not be able to tell yet whether your revisions are really improvements. So revise toward brevity—remove words instead of adding them. Toward directness—language that isn’t evasive or periphrastic. Toward simplicity—in construction and word choice. Toward clarity—a constant lookout for ambiguity. Towa

The familiarity with which we know our own lives is sometimes disabling. Writing is a special instance of that. In responding to your own prose, you’re responding in some sense to yourself, And no matter how hard you look, you’re almost invisible to yourself, Camouflaged by familiarity. One basic strategy for revision is becoming a stranger to what

The point of learning the fundamental language of grammar and syntax Isn’t correctness or obeying the rules. It’s keeping the rules from obtruding themselves upon the reader Because you’ve ignored them.

your mind never relinquishes what really matters.

No one will teach you how to wait while you think or what to wait for while you’re thinking. You’ll have to teach yourself. Above all, you’ll have to teach yourself to be patient.

There’s always an urge among writers To turn fleeting observations and momentary glimpses Into metaphors and “material” as quickly as possible, As if every perception ended in a trope, As if the writer were a dynamo Turning the world into words. The goal is the opposite: To get your words, your phrases, As close as you can to the solidity, The mate