the art of writing

You don’t have writer’s block. You’re just scared to say what you actually think. As my friend Jeremy Giffon says: “The best writing prompt for when I'm stuck is simply ‘be more honest.”

Many of your friends will be afraid to give you harsh feedback. Remedy that by asking: “What’s the 10% I need to keep, no matter what? A followup question: “What’s the 10% I’ll cut, if I absolutely had to cut?” (Got this from my interview with Tim Ferris

You can almost always improve your writing by being more specific. Don’t write “I got in my car” when you can write “I got in my ‘65 Mustang.”

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A writer could blast out her opinions, but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think.

While writing, you can follow Nintendo’s methodology. While the rest of the Internet is talking about the latest Netflix show or the new book at the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, you can pull from old and under-valued ideas instead. Find classic movies through the Criterion Collection, classic speeches on YouTube, and classics that are

Removing excess words is good advice, but it ends up driving people to cut all the life from their writing until it becomes overly minimalistic. Don’t suck the life out of your writing in the name of grammar.

Master, what about pursuits such as in sports, business, the performing arts . . . Are prescriptions equally poisonous in those domains. M: Yes. S: But there is a technique to those things, is there not. M: There are indeed some mechanical elements. Such as physical technique. And, as they apply to a mechanical element, prescriptions may be of some

My friend was a brilliant conversationalist, one of the brightest minds I’ve met, but he never put his thoughts into writing. It’s extra-sad that his thoughts are gone, too.