Writing
What are the best original sources that everyone else quotes? Find that book and aim to know it.
... See moreTo my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that’s going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures. And I actually tested this out for myself. I read one hunk of Gibbon ‘s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, then I read a part of War and Peace which is a grand historical novel, right, so I figured that’s
Before he kicks off his original reporting for a book, he first reads every piece of secondary material on his subject (and time period) he can get his hands on, from other seminal books on them to national and magazine stories from the time, followed by small-town newspaper articles.
Your early writing or business will probably suck.
Mine did.
They’ll improve but only if you give yourself permission to suck first.
Thucydides had Herodotus, Gibbon had Thucydides. Shelby Foote had Gibbon. Everyone has a master to learn from.
8. For the next seventy-four years he could, and did, sew superbly, and kept his hand in by doing a piece of sewing every day of his life.
... See moreIf you double your skill, for example, the number of people producing at your level probably falls by much more than a factor of two. This helps explain Karlsson’s results. As he spent more time optimizing his essays, the pool of competition diminished rapidly, greatly increasing the value to his potential readers. The best strategy for growing his
... See moreThere's also something humbling and awful about what's on the page is never as good as what's in your head and so if you keep it in your head it's safe and good and you're not going through this awful uncomfortable middle period … I think this is why people hang on to projects or write and rewrite them … there's a real ugliness to the early