Sublime

First, your early drafts are

Paragraphing is a subtle but important element in writing nonfiction articles and books—a road map constantly telling your reader how you have organized your ideas. Study good nonfiction writers to see how they do it. You’ll find that almost all of them think in paragraph units, not in sentence units. Each paragraph has its own integrity of content

The screenwriter Craig Mazin, creator of the award-winning TV series Chernobyl, is big on the Hegelian dialectic. He talks about it as a way of approaching writing: ‘constant changing. Every scene begins with a truth, something happens inside of that scene. There is a new truth at the end and you begin, and you begin, and you begin.’

awful and only starts to shine through rewrites, beta reading, and

editing. A draft is still a baby; it’s unfair to judge it by the standards of a grown-up book. Second, creating useful nonfiction is a task of manual labor, not genius. When people say they’re “bad