Tim

The cities of his day were “dots on a rural landscape,” and of course he couldn’t hop between them on a plane.

If you’re using sticky notes, then we recommend designating different colored stickies for hooks, stories within the chapter, key points, visuals, and reader interaction. If your index cards or sticky notes are all the same color, you can use different colored pens or Sharpies to get the same color-coding effect.

Adding shorter paragraphs, more subheadings, lists, and hot takes would get more readers to skim my posts, yet I’ll often find myself intentionally writing posts with long paragraphs and without headings, lists, and hot takes just to reward readers who read, like a parent putting a candy bar in the bottom of their kids’ laundry baskets to reward

The way to get over creative block is to simply place some constraints on yourself. It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom. Write a song on your lunch break. Paint a painting with only one color. Start a business without any start-up capital. Shoot a movie with your iPhone and a few of your friends.

Type the heading “Back Matter.” List each item you plan to include, giving a rough estimate of its length.

As a sales document, your proposal literally must have something for everyone—specifically, a section written to satisfy the concerns of every department.

The first question to ask yourself is whether the material even belongs in your book.

Your customer should be the hero of the story, not your brand.

I’ll give you my explicit mission for Trust Me, I’m Lying. I told myself: I am writing an exposé of the media system that will shock and appall people who follow the news or are trying to market something—because I’m the only one in the world who can do it. I also consciously told myself that I was writing this book at this time (instead of later)