the art of writing

'In my experience,' he told me, 'if you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either. Now, running to a thing, that's a different matter,

6 tips from John Steinbeck on writing:

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.

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Because right now there is someone

Out there with

a wound in the exact shape

of your words.

But the future is not a self-fulfilling prophecy - 8 billion people on this planet have a voice and that carries far more weight than one person with 8 billion dollars. We just forgot how to exercise it.

Ezra Klein on the dangers of using ChatGPT for serious writing and the importance of intellectual labor in the writing process:

ChatGPT will never tell you is that the problem with what you're doing is that it's the wrong thing entirely chat gpt is always going to give you the answer of how do you tweak how do you rewrite how do you do the thing

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From George Saunders, on nuance and embracing complexity:

the writer doesn't have to have a fixed firm idea, but has to be able to take the reader on a journey to remind her that the world is complicated. From the very beginning, I understood writing to be about some kind of moral or ethical imperative. Absent that, I'm not that interested in it,

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