“You’ve written the story in a logical forward timeline“ agent said. “You instead need to write it about the feelings you were having. Organize it that way. Each chapter does not have to follow the previous one in time.

writing about your other interests gets other people interested.

You write about what happened, but you can never capture the actual event.​ The role of the word may be to commoditise knowledge, but everything feeds into everything else, and by writing things down, no matter how disconnected they are from their source, we can provide the seeds of new things that would not otherwise have existed.

To _try_ and generalize this perhaps I’d say any practice contains a mechanism for instantiating intention.

Yes, we give feedback and encouragement and suggestions, but we also bond over our art, letting each other in on the oft-solitary process of figuring out our thoughts and our stories. We push each other, teach each other, and ultimately shape each other and our work. A page to remind everyone what art is — love from many sources, shaped by an individual, to be shared. You release your belief that everything has to do with you and that you are in complete control. This is not a passive act. It involves working in favor of things that you surrender to and accepting that the results of your actions are not in your control. Dropbox mirror: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cwujmj6y3ezn6lu/ripple01.pdf?dl=0

I can only allow myself to create new. Too many times I’ve revisited old attempts at works, miring myself in past writing and thoughts. No more. No more reinventing, no more trying to salvage. Enough.

Over the past eight years, one thing that’s different is that I take longer breaks. I’ll sometimes go months without writing, which is not something I used to do. I used to write every day. I still take a lot of notes, but I think I allow myself more time to be receptive to the world, as opposed to always worrying about saying something. I think it’s very much a poet’s novel, which means it’s basically—a woman stands out in a field thinking about other times she stood out in a field. And I think a lot of my energy when living in the city was going towards the performance of being human. That idea of “Hello! Look, I got dressed today. Ta-da!”

This past week, when I wrote my latest newsletter, the rut had been filled, and the words flowed out of me like the days that taught me how to love writing. There’s that Rilke quote, “if your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches.” When I read it recently, it felt accusatory, but with time, I realized that I’d lost some sense of curiosity, the wow-have-you-seen-this-shit-this-is-so-cool lens that fuels all good art.

With these newsletters and most things I write, I don’t know where I’m going — I generally start with an idea or an experience and explore from there.

Every time it’s a new thing.

Just share what’s of importance to you. And don’t look at pageviews. Don’t seek claps. Don’t chase reposts. Don’t covet trackbacks. Seek the unique pleasure of having shared something you feel is worth sharing. And the conversations that sort of writing (that sort of blogging) encourages. And yes, it can take time. Good things generally do.

You don’t have to know everything about a topic to write a book on it. You just have to be very interested in something and keep your audience in mind. ​ Technical books don’t have to be written in order. If you have a strong outline, you can hop to some other part of it if you are feeling stuck on the bit you are working on.

Because starting means imperfection. It means trying and sometimes (maybe even frequently) failing. It means sometimes re-reading your own words one day, month, year later and thinking “how in the hell did I ever think that was an acceptable sentence” and not taking that as an invitation to stop.

The type of seeing we’re referring to here is less ocular and more oracular. ​ There are hidden pennies everywhere. Our job is to see them. ​ Because in the end, after all of your goals are over and through (achieved or not), when the final tally is counted, these are the only pennies you can keep.

Writer Ted Gioia on how important high-quality inputs are to mainting high-quality output.

“Race to the Top; what a horrid metaphor for education. A race? Everyone is on the same track, seeing how fast they can go? Racing toward what? The top? The top of what? Education is not a race, it’s an amble. Real education only occurs when everyone is ambling along their own path.” —Peter Gray ​ 2. Always work (note, write) from your own interest, never from what you think you should be noting or writing. Trust your own interest.

and while I’m so glad that I did, I feel like those wounds are still open and won’t close until the book is out in the world and in people’s hands.

There are lots of reasons, but a main one is that no project goes on endlessly, or should. It can’t be leg day forever. It’s been such an absolute joy to stay up late at night at the sleepover and tell secrets with you.

A story about the distances technology fails to bridge.

It was as if the news of his cancer’s progression opened something inside of him so that he could clearly see into another world, another place he was on his way to. Whatever it was he saw endowed him with an overwhelming generosity of spirit and the most intense humanity I had ever witnessed. I don’t mean he wandered around performing good deeds; it was something more internal. He was overtaken by something like joy. Not a giggling and hysterical one, but a calming joy that infected every room he entered. ​ When you know somebody with less than six months to live and that person agrees to spend any moment of it with you at all, the immensity of that generosity does change you, undeniably. ​ —or, as my coworker, Jeff, used to say before he left the job and moved to California to be a social worker: Khalil is crackers, an arrival straight from the cracker factory. Why would the world endow this young boy with such wackiness, with the young Johnny Cash’s lopsided gait and pool-ball eyes, with the right amount of kindness to soothe the youngest children in the room and the right amount of self-assurance not to be intimidated by the presence of the older children, if he were not meant to live? I know that Khalil will be famous one day—a rock star, a basketball hero, a politician who will become the first Arab American President of the United States because he is so beautiful, and he knows suffering, and he will be cured, and I know for sure: he will live long enough to enter a presidential election, he will live long past thirty-five. ​ Some kids arrive in class sailing down the hallway on their IV poles ​ He never laughs anymore, and I thought I’d never hear him laughing again,” she said, and she was crying. ​ We enjoy ourselves in Writers’. ​ I helped him write—a loose hug that lasted at least the length of a single poem, but often, towards the end of his life, a hug that lasted the entire class.

And so here we are: leaning on an open, beautifully staid, inert protocol. SMTP as our savior. ​ Mr. Chimero almost never writes but when he does makes the day a good day. ​ These newsletters are the most backed up pieces of writing in history, copies in millions of inboxes, on millions of hard drives and servers, far more than any blog post.

This is a false dichotomy because communication is a technical skill. The ability to articulate complex ideas is a hallmark of deep understanding. ​ In other words, they are commended for having to deal with the debris of leftover chaos they usually didn’t create, nor had very much control over. ​ Communication skills allow an individual to understand and be understood. They combine self-awareness, empathy, active listening, speaking, and observing into a cocktail of abilities that grease the wheels of every interaction, but often go undetected. Dissociating communication and technical skills, while seemingly innocuous and even pragmatic, can create a harmful dichotomy, one that stunts corners of the industry. ​ Lexical double-booking ​ let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. ​ but it also allows incompetence to hide behind unnecessarily intellectualized terminology. ​ Those with strong communication skills are capable of using domain-specific language appropriately while also being capable of context-switching to adapt their message to their audience. ​ Being clear is not about being dumb, but, as Eugenia Cheng said, about identifying a problem with the precision and clarity that is appropriate for the context. ​ The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

Finishing a paragraph or section gives people a micro-burst of accomplishment and reward. It helps them chunk the basic insight together and remember it for later. You want people to be going – “okay, insight, good, another insight, good, another insight, good” and then eventually you can tie all of the insights together into a high-level insight. Then you can start over, until eventually at the end you tie all of the high-level insights together. It’s nice and structured and easy to work with. If they’re just following a winding stream of thought wherever it’s going, it’ll take a lot more mental work and they’ll get bored and wander off. ​ Deliberate use of parallelism is okay and even commendable. Usually this involves using the same structure to call attention to certain differences. ​ I think this microhumor stuff is really important, maybe the number one thing that separates really enjoyable writers from people who are technically proficient but still a chore to read.

@JadeMasterMath: There are lots of mathematical concepts which don’t have well written resources to learn about them. I think that explaining something in a clear way with a story arc can sometimes be enough. @jeremyjkun: Write about the topics that you learned, where there was a succinct phrase, picture, or idea that suddenly made it clear. Then arrange the whole blog post around getting the reader to that same understanding.

Why do people care so much about a piece of — no offense — punctuation?

My writing pace accelerates whenever I find myself in a learning rich environment, which is why I wrote so much in my first two years out of school and over the past three years at Stripe. ​ but even more important for me is that Stripe Press is a bit unusual: they typically buy completed manuscripts, rather than proposals. This gave me an extraordinary amount of latitude in my approach to writing, the book’s format and marketing the book. ​ I am truly amazed by folks who are able to write when raising young children, caring for their parents, or otherwise committed: it takes a great deal of privilege to write a book. ​ and I’m deeply grateful that I’ve gotten to do it. So far, I think the hardest bit will be a small sense of loss after it all quiets down, e.g. the return to normalcy. ​ If I wrote another book, I would spend more time outline in detail to build the small pieces more intentionally over the course of the book. _whispers: “composition”_ Honest feedback is very hard to find when writing a book, since you have to find (a) someone who will give hard feedback, and (b) someone who is willing to read your book. That’s a small intersection.

At some point, sadness will creep up your hands while you write and you won't know why. There are feelings writing can unearth long before the words to describe them. It's okay to stop. All blood pulses back to the heart. You don't need to open a vein to find your pulse.

Online writing is too didactic. Would like to recapture the feeling that not everything I read has to explicitly deliver information - feels like that's more frequently the case with stuff I've found offline My hunch is that digital writing evolves to be more responsive to measurable engagement, so there's an ever-present incentive to optimize what's written for utility (why internet content also gravitates toward self-helpyness)

As a writer, the question of worth is still one that plagues me. Today’s existential anxiety attack was set off by missing the compost drop off bc I was working on an essay. Not a solicited essay, one I want to write so I am (hopefully it'll be published but who knows) Especially on days when I’m not earning $, I put great stock in doing chores. Since I can’t contribute $ to the family, at least I can do the dishes, make dinner, dust, etc. This in part stems from my working class upbringing. And perhaps the masculine stereotype of “providing” So when I missed the compost drop off, I had a moment of absolute panic and an irrational dip of self-esteem. I had one job to do! Dropping off the goddamn compost. If I can't do that, then what good am I? As a partner, a dad, a human being. It got BIG real fast. Is it writing if it never gets published? Is it really work if I'm not being paid for it? I keep telling myself yes, hang in there, it’ll all work out, but some days I feel like I’m just mouthing the words and I don’t really believe them. Today has been one of those.

That gaze is a monolithic one: it’s the mass of readers I am potentially failing by writing something pretentious, boring and not worth their time. Everyone is watching! It had better be good! It's is the gaze that says: You can't write unless you're describing everything in the cellar. ​ And most of all, letters make me feel like I am reading things that were written to me and for me alone. And that's my favorite feeling in the world. ​ So maybe the privacy I’m talking about really is just trust, and the ability to write to someone you know will still love you despite your writing. ​ —I’m talking about a friend who loves you enough to edit your writing.