On Writing
The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s to write what you like. Write the kind of story you like best—write the story you want to read. The same principle applies to your life and your career: Whenever you’re at a loss for what move to make next, just ask yourself, “What would make a better story?”
Austin Kleon • Steal Like An Artist - a book by Austin Kleon
"You won’t write well until you understand that writing is an evolving process, not a finished product. Nobody expects you to get it right the first time, or even the second time."
William Zinsser • On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
medium.com • The Cult of Done Manifesto. The Cult of Done Manifesto Is a Special… | by Bre Pettis | Medium
Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over to get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that's why I write them.
Paul Graham • Putting Ideas Into Words
"In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts."
Anne Lamott • Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
"Who cares if the first draft is good? It doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be, so you can revise it. You don’t need an idea to start a story. You just need a sentence"
- George Saunders
(good advice in general)
Andy Weissmantwitter.comTo him - and again, he is not alone in this - the benefit of generative AI is in streamlining the production of a text product.
An Unserious Book
Text is not prose
Writing is hard, and it’s not surprising that the promise of removing that friction from the writing process is appealing. But we need to be able to recognize when removing the friction from the process might mean losing something important.