the art of writing
advice from writers, and more on writing
Brie Wolfson and
the art of writing
this hurdle I have to jump over each time I write: How can I say this more crisply? When I write (which is really just to say: when I think) it all boils down to one simple, but utterly excruciating question: What am I really trying to say here?
Isabel Hazan • distillation
When I have a problem, and it’s proving difficult to solve, I’ll often go on a walk about it, go talk to a friend about it, go try to solve it again. But when it’s proving intransigent, I’ll go write an essay proving why it just cannot be solved. That almost always fixes it.
Emmett Sheartwitter.com
Beautiful, on writing
BALDWIN: When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about. When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
great writing advice. one of my fave Sublime collections I keep private does just this and I call it “phrases”
Chekhov: “The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.”
Ashley Zhang • Surrender control over your stories
There are two kinds of writing; alive writing and dead writing. Alive writing invokes sensuousness, expansion, and insight. It transforms and enlarges its reader. It is a kind of disclosure; simultaneously immanent and transcendent. Dead writing is passive, sentimental and afraid of telling the truth. It discloses nothing except its own... See more