When you find a good one, look for multiple places to use it. You should be like a ten-year-old boy with a slingshot who just found a really round rock.

If you traffic in metaphors, collecting them, enjoying them, you run a much better chance of contributing your own in due time.

Even if you don’t wind up using most of what you record, it is still a helpful mental exercise to write down striking phrases that you find in other writers.

But if you should be there, if God has called you to the writing life, then put it out there and offer no apologies for having done so. Then, don’t be defensive when you get the feedback. Don’t criticize it yourself beforehand, but when the criticism comes afterwards, listen. Take notes.

Openness to criticism is not the same thing as apologizing for breathing. If you shouldn’t be there, don’t be there. If you shouldn’t have written it, then delete the file.

Speaking of criticism, your enemies will sometimes be more accurate, more perceptive, and more to the point than your mom.

Do what you would love to be able to do someday.

If a striking expression hits you, don’t hold back just because you are writing an email to your sister.

Outright quotation can have this affect also, but it is easier for quotation to go wrong and seem pretentious. Allusion is for the reader who picks up on it, and if he does, he is “in on it.”