Writing
Love to write~
Writing
this hurdle I have to jump over each time I write: How can I say this more crisply? When I write (which is really just to say: when I think) it all boils down to one simple, but utterly excruciating question: What am I really trying to say here?
Isabel Hazan • distillation
It is humbling to see how much crossing out Dickens did, how much rewriting and cutting.
Anna Quindlen • Write for Your Life
Well, you need dirt to grow plants. A farmer I admire once wrote that 90% of his job was dirt management. Manage the dirt well and the plants grow themselves.
James Horton, PhD. • The Nonwriter's Guide to Writing A Lot
A good topic sentence will:
Create a tension
Point you in the right direction
Delight you with elegance
Could rules of poetry inform paragraphs?
"Authorship"-in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity-was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the "books" they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble
... See moreI devoured the books because they were the rays of light peeking out from the doorframe, and perhaps past that door there was another world, one beyond the gripping fear that undergirded the Dream.
Ta-Nehisi Coates • Between the World and Me
There are two modes of information discovery: foraging and hunting. Foraging is passive. You don’t have a clear goal; you just wander and scroll until something catches your interest. Hunting is active and purposeful. You know what you’re looking for and are consciously searching for it. A good information diet needs both: Foraging helps us decide
... See moreSari Azout • The End of Productivity
I would argue that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing—the place where coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words. If the moment of quickening is to come, it comes at the level of the paragraph.