becoming a better writer

if any artist tells you, “I am a camera,” or “I am a mirror,” distrust them instantly, they’re fooling you, pulling a fast one. Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside.

Have killer voice. How do you develop killer voice? Be confident. How do you develop confidence? Read oodles and write oodles more. If you’re sending a “list newsletter” you better have one hell of a point of view because, well, there are oodles-upon-oodles of list newsletters out there. Generally, like with much good writing, the magic for readers

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If you’re a young woman who wants to write fiction, it’s useful to read zeitgeist-y contemporary writers like Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh, Elena Ferrante, and Mary Gaitskill—but you’d be missing a great deal by not reading Clarice Lispector and Edith Wharton.

When All Else Fails, Go to the Movies

“It’s what I call the Don Draper Principle,” says Abbott, “because he always did that on Mad Men . I tend to see something, usually horror, something that completely demands my attention and is very big and spectacle-oriented, because it can knock me out of what I’m thinking about in a good way. Or sometimes it... See more

Gornick, again: “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.”

But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more

“I can feel jealous of David Sedaris’s fame, I can feel like I’ll never get to that point, but I should ask myself: am I doing 15 or 20 full rewrite drafts of my essays? Am I pushing myself to search for a universal feeling, for a moment of poignancy, and for a laugh, all in the same piece? Am I doing what he did, in my own way? No, no, and no. I a

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E. B. White on writing for children (1969) This is it. https://t.co/a1Kj9TwfJN

There are times I sit down to write this thing and all I’ve got is a spark of an idea. There’s nothing fiery in my belly waiting to get out. This is one such time. I was whining about it to my husband and he wisely said, “just write about all your half ideas.”