the art of writing

In employing prescriptions, he will approach the non-mechanical in a mechanical way. He will replace the power of his instincts, with manufactured notions of correctness and incorrectness. He will replace his inner voice with the voices of others. And when the prescriptions begin to fail, he will need new ones.

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.

P.S. I just found an old video from the time I interviewed Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the most famous scientists in the world.

When I asked him about the poetry of his language, he said he almost never says something in public that he hasn't written down before. "Short words that are potent are what should be promoted in writing."

An empty white page is a mirror into your mind. When the ideas in your mind are clouded, so are the words on the page in front of you. Re-writing is re-thinking. It’s the best single best way to sharpen your ideas. And once your ideas are as clear as a Neiman Marcus mirror, you’ll be able to teach them to others.

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.

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.

Don’t assume that the reader knows what you know. Rewind back to the beginning, and start over again. Make the whole experience human, and create a path that carries the ebbs and flows you felt when you first thought about it.

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