becoming a better writer

Obviously you can pick books that fit your interests, but if you’re looking to read to be a better writer, setting goals to read books that will improve your range of knowledge, even if they aren’t as fun as Harry Potter or whoever, is vital. You might not love every second of The Magic Mountain or The Unconsoled , but you will have absorbed someth... See more

Do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

from the radio producer Ira Glass, on feeling disappointed by your own work:

All of us who do creative work...get into it because we have good taste. But there’s a gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making...It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’

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we’ll need to return to David Ogilvy to explain it. Part of his influence comes from two books, Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963) and Ogilvy on Advertising (1983), which laid out his approach to advertising, and how clear, resonant language and crisply executed graphic design could turn a mere commodity into something desirable. But the book... See more

In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind . It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole... See more

“I wish I could observe life like Maggie Nelson,” I said to my manager.

“You can,” he replied. “I think reading literature makes one much more attentive. I go from ‘writing op-eds about who is good and who is bad’ to ‘writing vignettes about what's amusing, unusual, or thematically resonant’ in my head. It's like, ‘What genre do I want my internal ... See more

My prose has tightened, the excess trimmed. Information efficiency is paramount. I write like the 12 dollar desk salad, the bar that packs 20 grams of protein and plastic into one 200-calorie brick. But good writing, like a good meal, needs fat. It should indulge readers, is meant to be chewed and enjoyed, affording a generous escape from the prosa... See more

But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more