becoming a better writer
Gornick, again: “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.”
౨ৎ Girl blog
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
Blake Butler • Maximizing Time for Reading
fiction is made out of experience, your whole life from infancy on, everything you’ve thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn’t something you go and get—it’s a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to... See more
Ursula K. Le Guin May 24 • Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer
A day job puts you in the path of other human beings. Learn from them, steal from them. I’ve tried to take jobs where I can learn things that I can use in my work later—my library job taught me how to do research, my Web design job taught me how to build websites, and my copywriting job taught me how to sell things with words.
Austin Kleon • Steal Like An Artist - a book by Austin Kleon
"How to clarify a concept you can't articulate:
1. Change mediums. Draw it. Photograph it. Sing it.
2. Change levels. Explain what is one level up (bigger picture) or one level down (finer details).
3. Change fields. What would this concept look like in different fields?"
(James Clear newsletter)
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.
Celine Nguyen • The Divine Discontent
I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning.
—C.S. Lewis
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
Jasmine Sun • the scenic route
Almost everything about the concept of “writer’s block” irritates me. The supposed greatest obstacle to success or productivity is structured so passively you’d think it was written by the New York Times trying to describe civilian death. “Writer’s block.” What exactly is being blocked and by whom? The process of writing — not writing well, just wr... See more
The Myth of Writer's Block
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