A Few Thoughts On Writing · Collaborative Fund. You have five seconds to get people’s attention.
Books, blogs, emails, reports, it doesn’t matter – if you don’t sell them in five seconds you’ve exhausted most of their patience. Good ideas are easy to write, bad ideas are hard. Difficulty is a quality signal, and writer’s block usually indicates more about your ideas than your writing. Impatience has increased with social media. Someone reading a book 20 years ago had few other distractions.
Whoever says the most stuff in the fewest words wins. Delete without mercy. Most good writing is a byproduct of good reading. Good ideas can’t be scheduled. If you have an idea but think “someone has already written that” just remember there are 1,010 published biographies of Winston Churchill. Neil Gaiman’s 8 Rules of Writing. By Maria Popova In the winter of 2010, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing published in The New York Times nearly a decade earlier, The Guardian reached out to some of today’s most celebrated authors and asked them to each offer his or her commandments.
After Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing, here come 8 from the one and only Neil Gaiman: WritePut one word after another. How to Write with Style: Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Keys to the Power of the Written Word – Brain Pickings. Find a Subject You Care About Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about.
It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do. Do Not Ramble, Though I won’t ramble on about that. Keep It Simple As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound.
Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. Have the Guts to Cut. Anne Lamott’s Timeless Advice on Writing and Why Perfectionism Kills Creativity. By Maria Popova “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people.
It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.” Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (public library) is among my 10 favorite books on writing — a treasure trove of insight both practical and profound, timelessly revisitable and yielding deeper resonance each time. Masters of Habit: The Wisdom and Writing of Maya Angelou. Sadly, Maya Angelou, the great American author and poet, has passed away.
She was known for her award-winning autobiographies as well as for her numerous plays, scripts, poems, and essays. Her most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, has sold millions upon millions of copies. It holds the record for the longest-running nonfiction New York Times best-seller (2 years). And in 2011, Time Magazine named it one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923. Famous Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers.
Stories. A Novel Strategy: How to Organize Big Writing Projects. Every November, hundreds of thousands of writers around the world come together in a fun, freewheeling virtual community.
In an annual explosion of creativity, these intrepid souls undertake to write a 50,000-word novel in just 30 days. Say hello to National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a. How to start your day with more creativity, serenity, and insight. Each morning our return to waking life is marked by a unique mental state.
In those first minutes of our day, our minds are in an estuary between the dream world and 3rd dimensional consciousness. Like an aquatic estuary, it’s ripe with nutrients and lifeforms that you can’t find anywhere else. This in-between state of the mind can be used for greater creativity, serenity, and flow. For many years I squandered these golden minutes. Being overly concerned with productivity had me immediately sprint to my daily to do list. Like an engine, or a muscle group, your mind runs a lot smoother if it’s allowed to gradually warm up. Inversely, going from sleep to mental sprinting can send the nervous system into Fight or Flight mode. Meditation has become quite popular in the business world for it’s ability to train the mind towards clarity of thought.
Hypnotists do their work by getting subjects to enter lower frequency brain waves states. I started doing Morning Pages 292 days ago. Strunk & White: 11 Composition Principles. Writer as Coder: The Iterative Way to Write a Book. By Leo Babauta The traditional way of writing a book is like the old Microsoft model of developing software: you write it in isolation for a year or two, and then put it out as a fully-formed product.
The problem with that method is that it’s never been tested in the real world. What I’ve Learned as a Writer. 125 Clickass Copywriting Tips.
Templates. 24 Quotes That Will Inspire You To Write More.