Writing
Thucydides had Herodotus, Gibbon had Thucydides. Shelby Foote had Gibbon. Everyone has a master to learn from.
“The person who creates better information flows gets better thoughts.” James Clear
What are the best original sources that everyone else quotes? Find that book and aim to know it.
... See moreI do it all on the typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript. The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine—and I mean strictly. I write for about three hours in the morning—from about 9:30 till 12:30—and I do another hour’s work between
Ian Fleming, How to Write a Thriller
... 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
That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write. You will become a scientist, if not of the natural world than of whatever world you care about. More of that world will pop alive. You will see more when you look at it.
James Somers • More People Should Write
10. You really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of balance. I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing.
The technique famously originates with the creativity teacher Julia Cameron, and I recommend her short book The Miracle of Morning Pages if you'd like to know more. But my practice is easy to summarise: I write, by hand, until I've filled three sides of an A5 notebook with words no-one else will ever see. The length requirement is fixed, but apart... See more
Oliver Burkeman • Three pages a day
Your early writing or business will probably suck.
Mine did.
They’ll improve but only if you give yourself permission to suck first.