Writing

“Trust your obsessions. This is one I learned more or less accidentally. People sometimes ask whether the research or the idea for the story comes first for me. And I tell them, normally the first thing that turns up is the obsession: for example, all of a sudden I notice that I’m reading nothing but English 17th century metaphysical verse. And I k... See more

“Being a writer is the best way I know how to get paid for being insane.” This 4-minute speech by author Fredrik Backman on “creative anxiety and procrastination” made me laugh.

By having zero expectations, I beat procrastination. Thinking about starting work creates resistance. What you’re really doing is preparing yourself to meet a standard, not start work. When your quality standards for your work are too high, you take longer to start work.

As a creator, your job is to find ONE idea that resonates, and then say it a thousand times.

“ Write about where you’ve been and where you’re going. Become a niche of one .”

By contrast, “deep freewriting” describes a practice in which you set a timer, then commit to writing without stopping or deleting until it goes off, while staying mentally present with the process. Importantly, that needn’t mean writing fast, and could even mean writing very slowly – just as it’s possible to run very slowly yet still be running, a... See more

“I wasn’t scared of missing, looking bad, or being embarrassed. That’s because I always kept the end result, the long game, in my mind. I always focused on the fact that I had to try something to get it, and once I got it, I’d have another tool in my arsenal. If the price was a lot of work and a few missed shots, I was OK with that.

I never felt ou... See more

I’ve found this a remarkably useful practice in the early stages of drafting, because it reverses the usual order of things. Instead of holding back from writing until you know what you want to say – which leads to a vicious circle of stopping, deleting, and rewriting everything a hundred times – the commitment to keeping moving means you just writ... See more