the art of writing
advice from writers, and more on writing
Brie Wolfson and
the art of writing
Sitting down to write in 2025 is its own kind of war with forces of distraction and click-to-buy shit at every turn.
Shakespeare and Jane Austen didn’t have to fight the itch to check Instagram every ten minutes while making their work.
They had oil lamps and real problems like measles or... See more
Allegra Preusssubstack.coma writer is quite simply someone who does not know how to navigate this world without putting pen to paper, someone who is preoccupied with words and sentences and story
the one about ai.
Time is the best editor.
If you have it, time is the easiest trick for self-editing. Simply put your work away long enough so when you come back to it you can see it with fresh eyes.
I’ve done many things to earn a living over the decades—from playing the piano to problem-solving in foreign climes—but writing is now my main focus. And the writing draws on all these earlier experiences.
This is the challenge many young writers face. They need to experience life in order to write about it. But that takes time.
This is the challenge many young writers face. They need to experience life in order to write about it. But that takes time.
An Interview With Ted Gioia
Ezra Klein on the dangers of using ChatGPT for serious writing and the importance of intellectual labor in the writing process:
... See moreChatGPT 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
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.
Celine Nguyen • In Praise of Writing on the Internet
You might experience this as a writer, where it’s doing you instead of you doing it. That’s the sweet spot, isn’t it? […] You’ve got to let the ego just go sit on the bench, and just hear what wants to be done through you…. See what wants to be born…. You’re not doing it, it’s doing you.”
Jeff Bridges is digging it.
In my experience, there is no such thing as “clerical work” in writing: the donkey work is crucial to the process, as is having to sort through the mess of the draft — that’s the art of self-editing, and it’s the art of finding what you didn’t know you were looking for