the art of writing
advice from writers, and more on writing
Brie Wolfson and
the art of writing
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.”
It is the stuff about you that is odd that is interesting. So, don’t think to much about how you are supposed to do it, or what the genre convetions are. Just try to amuse yourself.
Another way to phrase it: the best writing tend to be when you surrender to your nature. This is hard to do!
Here is a classic pattern: you try really hard to do
... See moreIt reminds me of writing and how I wake up week after week and get stuck on the blank page again and again. How I always despair that I have no more good ideas and, even if I did, not enough eloquence to convey said ideas. But I love it still. I love how writing brings everything to the surface, how it generates and absorbs my attention. How it
... See morein praise of slowing down
The only thing that matters, to me, is to arrange the writing in such a way that I repeatedly return to ideas again and again . I want to reread and make comments and rearrange my notes, not just type it and move on. The reason for that: I’m not particularly interesting or insightful at any point in time, but if I let five or ten Henriks layer... See more
Henrik Karlsson • Writing in a way that gets your thoughts to flow
The kind we love is focused, challenging, sustained, with a pen in hand, making note of new turns of phrase and peculiar, precise words, and feeling our brains get ever-so-slightly reconfigured by the text. The kind of reading we love requires a piece of text be worked over so many times that the author probably never wants to see it again. The... See more
