the art of writing

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.

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.

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

If you update the language and some references, books written thousands of years ago sound like they could have been written today. The human condition remains the same. Your book has all the wisdom you need. Read metaphorically, and apply it to your modern life.

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.

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.

When people give opinions, add a question mark. If they say, “Immigration is bad,” change it to, “Immigration is bad?” Let the questions drift away, unanswered.

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.