your meaning and the intent of the whole piece Depend entirely on the sentence you’re making.

You may notice, as you write, that sentences often volunteer a shape of their own And supply their own words as if they anticipated your thinking. Those sentences are nearly always unacceptable, Dull and unvarying, yielding only a small number of possible structures And only the most predictable phrases, the inevitable clichés.

Pursue clarity instead. In the pursuit of clarity, style reveals itself. Your clarity will differ from anyone else’s without your intending to make it differ. Years later, looking back over your collected works, You can contemplate your style at leisure. But for now you have more important things to think about.

Learn to distrust words like “genius,” “inspiration,” “flow,” “natural,” and “organic” when you think about your work. (Don’t use them when you talk about it either.)

True discipline is remembering and recovering—inventing if necessary—what interests you. If it doesn’t interest you, how could it possibly interest anyone else?

The writer’s job isn’t accepting sentences. The job is making them, word by word.

Proof is for mathematicians. Logic is for philosophers. We have testimony.

Is it possible to practice noticing? I think so. But I also think it requires a suspension of yearning And a pause in the desire to be pouring something out of yourself. Noticing is about letting yourself out into the world, Rather than siphoning the world into you In order to transmute it into words. Practicing noticing will also help you learn

Revise at the point of composition. Compose at the point of revision. Accept no provisional sentences. Make no drafts And no draft sentences. Bring the sentence you’re working on as close to its final state as you can Before you write it down and after. Do the same for the next sentence And right on through to the end. Think of composition and