But of course, email and social media and games are obvious distractions. In my experience, the more subtle threat -- particularly for non-fiction writers -- comes via the eminently reasonable belief that you’re not ready to start writing, because you haven’t finished your research yet. ​ But as much as I enjoy it, I have learned the hard way that you are never done with your research. Waiting around for the research phase to be complete is a recipe for infinite postponement. ​ when you’re researching in media res, the new ideas or details or stories that you stumble across are much more useful to you, because you can immediately see the slots where they belong.

Stories that elicit a big reaction provide us with a big opportunity to acknowledge our most challenging emotions and to wrestle with the assumptions, ideas, and beliefs that may no longer serve us. And that's the *whole* point of writing, of communicating, and of being human.

How does anyone write anything for online, where you have to assume everyone is going to read everything you write in bad faith? I am so tired of wrapping every sentence in qualifiers and building the context for every statement. This could be 100 words, yet I am at 1500.

We procrastinate to protect ourselves.​ Distractions allow us to delay the moment of truth where we need to show who we really are, what we can really do, where we need to expose ourselves, prove ourselves, and ultimately face the mirror of reality.

I was — and still am — that girl. I am the girl who can’t stand in line for coffee without repeating my order to myself in my head, over and over, until I’m finally at the cash register. I am the girl who sometimes takes too long to respond to texts, DMs and emails because I am drafting out a decent reply. I am the girl who teachers consistently push to “participate more” because I don’t raise my hand enough in class. I am the girl who struggles in conversations with people I haven’t met before — and even those I have. I may be the quiet girl, but I have plenty to say. Just let me gather my thoughts first.

this tweet inspired by elissa, who has been sitting next to me on the couch as i've spent all day writing, who just turned to me and said: "i feel like you think i don't love you when you're writing but i just wanted to let you know that i do"— jonny sun (@jonnysun) February 10, 2019

Every time I take my iPad out to the cafe instead of my laptop to encourage myself to get some writing done, I’m reminded that if I were primarily a writer, there’s no doubt in my mind I’d be using iOS full time by now.

when nothing seems to be happening, or random stuff is having an incoherent party inside your head.

I was teaching writing all day but not writing myself, and on twitter so many people I knew were starting tinyletters, sending small paragraphs of heart-rending, un-pitch-able prose, family stories and recipes and album recommendations and lowkey erotica in little forward-marching scrolls of text that I’d read curled around my phone late at night while I couldn’t sleep. I was jealous of my students and I was jealous of everyone starting tinyletters and of everyone publishing essays, and of the world going on one bright achievement after another all around me. I wrote some paragraphs quickly, without looking, like muttering under my breath, told myself I didn’t have to edit it because no one would read it anyway, and hit send. The whole college application is a murderously hopeful document, and hope is the most mercenary emotion, the struck-match trick of salespeople and con artists and politicians, leaving the door unlocked at night, risking everything in a game to which no one told us the rules.

This schedule went viral on Twitter with the caption: “Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing routine is the ideal writing routine.” It’s a lovely, lovely thing, but it should be pointed out that it was an “ideal” routine for her, too, as she says in the 1988 interview it’s excerpted from. (Left out: “I go to

“Everyone thinks they can write, because everybody writes,” said Rasenberger, referring to the proliferation of casual texting, emailing and tweeting. But she distinguishes these from professional writers “who have been working on their craft and art of writing for years.” “What a professional writer can convey in written word is far superior to what the rest of us can do,” said Rasenberger. “As a society we need that, because it’s a way to crystallize ideas, make us see things in a new way and create understanding of who we are as a people, where we are today and where we’re going.”

“As I said last year, I have no idea how what I make compares w other writers. I'm sharing bc I think writers should be talking more about $$$ and finances and the realities of writing, because these realities affect who can afford to write, and whose voices are heard.”

“I think that the opposite is true too—the writing should be able to exist alongside the image without being redundant. Writing simple summary or description of what is in the picture is not enough. To attempt and recreate what the photo is already doing is a fool’s errand because describing the contents of a picture can never compete with or replace the actual visual thing. The best we can do is try to translate what the pictures make us feel, and try and understand why they affect us in the way they do.”

Yes! I recommend this for proofreading all the time. https://t.co/vW1z5xNv46— Sid Orlando (@ohreallysid) November 14, 2018

Paul Graham

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book. —George Steiner Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks’ love of words, and he’s been posting images of Sacks’ hand-annotated

“But, for writers, maybe it’s not just returning to the things we love… maybe it’s embedding the things we love in new things that we write that keeps those fish alive.”

I’m proofing the third pass of Keep Going. I find it really difficult at this stage of a project to get the right perspective — “fresh eyes” — for the thing, which makes it really, really hard to make edits. The production schedule for this book has been much more accelerated than any of my

“Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new.” —David McCullough In his Paris Review interview, David McCullough talks about how important seeing is to the writer and historian, and

Some days back I was having a conversation about the importance of memos and documents in an agile/fast-moving startup company. The person…

Over on Twitter, I saw this insightful observation: She is not wrong. There’s a lot of writing advice that focuses on, “shut off the inner critic, just write, you can fix it in editing&…

“The heart of becoming a writer is to come into focus on oneself. To know — and usually it’s best not to know until after you’ve done it — what has finally become important to write about and what you can say that no one else particularly can say.”

“Why not write for an audience of one? Craft the most personal letter to one of your friends, and send it. Can you make them cry with joy? Make that your goal.”

I was an economics major in college, and I've been grateful ever since for a few key concepts those courses drilled into me: things like opp

That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write. You will become a scientist, if not of the natural world than of whatever world you care about. More of that world will pop alive. You will see more when you look at it.

Great code reads like great prose. It is succinct, expressive, and clear the first time you read it.