Worth the Climb: Self-Editing Secrets That Actually Work
The act of putting words on the page is a metaphor for the way we put our two feet into our lives—meaning
Allison Fallon • The Power of Writing It Down: A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life
How writers can move up and down the ladder of abstraction
Mallary Tenore Tarpleymallary.substack.com
“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
... See moreVerlyn Klinkenborg • Several Short Sentences About Writing
"The first useful concept is the idea of short assignments. Often when you sit down to write, what you have in mind is an autobiographical novel about your childhood, or a play about the immigrant experience, or a history of— oh, say— say women. But this is like trying to scale a glacier."
Anne Lamott • Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
once heard the great Chicago writer Stuart Dybek say, “A story is always talking to you; you just have to learn to listen to it.” Revising like this is a way of listening to the story and of having faith in it: it wants to be its best self, and if you’re patient with it, in time, it will be. Essentially, the whole process is: intuition plus iterati
... See more