Writing

-Don’t let your job and other responsibilities hold you back. You can be a professional writer one hour a day.

-Know what you will work on that day. How has Ryan Holiday been able to write more than a dozen books in as many years? He says that when he sits down to write, his goal is not, “finish the rough draft,” or “write until noon.” His goal is “write section 2 of chapter 3.”

-Set a stop time. Writing without a stop time is torture, Jerry Seinfeld said. “It’s like if you hire a trainer to get in shape, and you ask, ‘How long is the session?’ And he says, ‘It’s open-ended.’ Forget it. I’m not doing it.” If you’re going to sit down and write, there has to be a reward for that. “And the reward is the alarm goes off and you’re done.”

-Write every day. It adds up. Simon Sinek put it like this: “It’s like exercising or brushing your teeth. You don’t get in shape by going to the gym for 8 hours a few times a year. You get in shape by going to the gym for 30 minutes four or five or six days a week.”

-If you can, write at the same time each day. This will train your subconscious—your creativity—to kick in.

-Be less concerned with writing well and more concerned with sharing good ideas.

-What, exactly, are you trying to say? Say that.

-Good writing isn’t about something. It’s for someone. Pretend like you’re writing to a friend.

-The biggest problem writers face, says Ryan Holiday, is that they have nothing to actually say. Writing for the sake of writing isn’t the point. What can you not not say?

-Don’t worry about finding your voice. Just write as clearly as you can. An authentic voice follows clear writing.

-If it doesn’t excite you, don’t write about it.

-At every stage of the writing process, ask yourself, what is this thing about? What is the theme? Sometimes finding the theme is hard. You may not even know the theme while you’re writing. But never stop trying to find it.

-Writers don’t get writer’s block. Writers get caught up in thinking about whether their writing is good or bad.

-Steven Pressfield said to sit without hope and without fear. To work at your desk without the hope of writing something good nor the fear of writing something bad. He explains, “When I sit down to write in the morning, I literally have no expectations for myself or for the day’s work. My only goal is to put in three or four hours with my fingers punching the keys. I don’t judge myself on quality. I don’t hold myself accountable for quantity. The only questions I ask are, Did I show up? Did I try my best?”

-In Lynda Barry’s What It Is there’s a short comic strip of a writer deep in thought, trying to figure out what she should write a book about. Ten years later, someone asks what her book is going to be about. “Shh! I’m still thinking,” she replies. We can’t think our way to good ideas. We have to roll up our sleeves. We have to do the work in front of us.

-Make time each day for your own work, and wear yourself out doing it.

-Don’t think about how long it’s going to take. Just focus on doing a little work on it each day.

-The best way to serve the world is to serve your work. And the best work is the work that connects the divine with the human.

–Haruki Murakami said the best way to express yourself as freely as possible is not to ask, “What am I seeking?” (which causes you to ponder heavy things and slows you up), but to instead ask, “Who would I be if I weren’t seeking anything?”

–The difference between genre and style. Genre is a category. Style is the life and humanity you give the art. As Jerry Saltz put it, “Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ is a classic country song; the vulnerability of her performance is what makes you die inside when you hear it.”

-The better story wins.

-Relax. You can’t read every book.

-A great way to live: follow your interests and share them with the world.

I’ve been having difficulty deciding how to begin a larger piece of writing. So I taped this list to my computer for guidance and inspiration:

-Create with whatever is in front of you and be indifferent to whether people like it.

-Articles are like songs and books are like records. And records are art. You can make them about anything you want.

-The work will be good if it comes out of necessity. It must be something you can’t not say.

-Write every day. Write what is inside of you, what naturally comes to the surface.

-You should feel excited about what you’re writing; it shouldn’t feel like a chore.

-Start with an image. Then give it form.

-Be more attentive to what is arising within you than what’s going on around you.

-First drafts are for the muse, inspiration, and spontaneity. Save thinking for the revising part.

-Start. Your piece will take shape as you go.

-“When in doubt, it’s Resistance.” -Steven Pressfield