On Writing

a painting that suggests is usually more engaging than one that tells. Everyone makes up their own story about the Mona Lisa.

I recognize the irony here of describing understanding through words, and you being the person that’s internalizing it as knowledge. But with that said, therein lies the value of writing. Writing is an attempt to share your lived experience with others, which makes you face the blind spots in your own thinking in real-time. When you write, it becom... See more

writing a book is nothing more than a heroic act of unification. How does this work? Well, the book has a spine. A dharma. But you don’t know what its dharma is until you begin to write it. Forget about all the things you said to yourself about your book at the beginning of the project—or what you told your editor, or what you wrote in your brillia

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On bad days meta-writing keeps me disciplined, giving me a reason to put pen to paper. As such, my private meta-writing is probably the greatest aid to producing public writing that I have. My journals are full of pages that start with what I planned to eat during the day and ended with a fresh idea, or an outline for a prospective article.

You’d be... See more

The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.

Good writing is meditative writing. It’s a polished and cohesive train of thought, devoid of superfluous babble. If intrusive thoughts make their way into your writing and you neglect to edit them out, your work will suffer. Quality writing does not arise from a stream of consciousness or absent-mindedness. It’s a practice of meditating on a specif... See more

The key to overcoming this precondition is to make writing a multi-pass process. Visual art is multi-pass: artists start with a rough sketch that captures the general idea for their composition. Then they go through and do a more detailed sketch, turning the rough lines into recognizable features, fiddling with proportions and placement until each ... See more