the start of an idea

"Who cares if the first draft is good? It doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be, so you can revise it. You don’t need an idea to start a story. You just need a sentence" - George Saunders (good advice in general)

By unfolding I mean “interrogating the conclusion to come up with an explanation of why it could be true.” What premises and reasoning chains leads to this conclusion? The explanation isn’t meant to prove that your conclusion was right. It is just a way of unpacking it.

By unfolding a claim into an explanation, you spread it on a “wider front” (to b... See more

"Paying rapt attention, whether to a trout stream or a novel, a do-it-yourself project or a prayer, increases your capacity for concentration, expands your inner boundaries, and lifts your spirits, but more important, it simply makes you feel that life is worth living." (Winifred Gallagher, Rapt)

"In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts."