the art of writing

Garry Tan isn't just the CEO of Y Combinator. He's also a passionate writer, has a YouTube channel with 251,000 subscribers, and once turned a $300k investment into $2 billion. Here are 10 of his best ideas: 1. How to write a good YC application: Teach the... See more

The novelist Jennifer Egan says, “You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly. You can’t write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”

Feeling like you’re worth listening to is a byproduct of making hard decisions and teasing out of them cohesive and convincing personal stories that help you make sense of the world.

Readers don’t have short attention spans—they have short enchantment spans . There’s an infinite amount of content out there, and readers know it. The introduction convinces a reader that their finite time alive is best spent reading this piece in front of them , and not all the other things on the internet.

There’s also something to be said about collating and curating in the slow writing process—facts, knowledge, smells, descriptions, stories, passport stamps, headlines—until the collection becomes part of the transformation process. Through acute and critical attention, away from the drive of production, toward the singularity of studying a branch,... See more

DP: Writing now has to be really, really good to stand out. People got really upset last December when I tweeted that AI’s writing is already better than the majority of Write of Passage students would be with a day’s worth of work. It made a lot of people upset, but I think it’s true. AI’s writing is great with a good prompt, which is why people... See more