the art of writing
advice from writers, and more on writing
Brie Wolfson and
the art of writing
It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say, I was just writing to the wrong people about the wrong things.
Molly Mielke • deliberate
”In my experience, here’s how essays form: You get all these bits of data that stick in your head… file drawers in your head. At a certain point you realize one of the drawers is now full, and you might have an essay.” Tim Kreider on the artist at midlife.
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 somethin
... See moreI think that greatness is best described as “invisibility.” Great writing is invisible. It might take you a minute or two to get into the flow, but once you’re reading it, you’re flowing through it and don’t even realize you are reading words. Your mind is hallucinating the story for you, so seamlessly that it feels like you’re imagining it for you... See more
Nat Eliason • Great Writing Is Invisible
gabriel and
'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,
John Wyndham - The Chrysalids
Trust the process.
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.
-Anne Lammott
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know”—a sentence, he added, without “scrollwork or ornament.”