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1. “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” – E.B. White
2. “Unless you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
3. "Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.” – Albert Einstein
4. “The monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” – Albert Einstein
5. "Many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” – Bell Hooks
6. "Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer. Put your principles into practice – now. Stop the excuses and the procrastination. This is your life! You aren’t a child anymore. The sooner you set yourself to your spiritual program, the happier you will be. The longer you wait, the more you’ll be vulnerable to mediocrity and feel filled with shame and regret, because you know you are capable of better. From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. Separate yourself from the mob. Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do – now." – Epictetus
7. "It is only through imagination that men become aware of what the world might be; without it, ‘progress’ would become mechanical and trivial.” – Bertrand Russell
8. "Ideas can feel complete. It's only when you try to put them into words that you discover they're not.” – Paul Graham
9. “Write without pay until somebody offers pay; if nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.” – Mark Twain
10. "A lot of books fail because the writer loses control of the research. You are either a master of the material or it's the master of you.” – Robert Greene
11. "Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day for all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
12. “We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans — because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone- because we have the impulse to explain who we are. Not just how tall we are, or thin… but who we are internally… perhaps even spiritually. There’s something, which impels us to show our inner-souls. The more courageous we are, the more we succeed in explaining what we know.” – Maya Angelou
13. “A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.” – May Sarton
14. "There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.” – Doris Lessing
15. "To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell.” – Jordan Peterson
16. “A scientist is happy, not in resting on his attainments but in the steady acquisition of fresh knowledge.” – Max Planck
17. "Many people are not ready for their lucky break when it comes to them. Develop your skills. Study your craft. Save some money. Build a network before you need it. Lay the ground work. The prepared person is positioned to benefit from unexpected opportunities.” – James Clear
18. "Whales only get harpooned when they surface." and "The tallest blade of grass is first to get cut." (A lot of people said this. I’m not sure who to credit.)
19. "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that” – John Stuart Mill
20. “Books record the deeds of leaders who once dared greatly, as well as those who dared too much, as a warning.” – Henry Kissinger
21. "I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.” – Albert Einstein
22. “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” – Amos Tversky
23. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” - Ray Bradbury
24. "You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” – Maya Angelou
25. "I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.” – J.D. Salinger


25 quotes from my commonplace book

In *The Firm*, a 1993 legal thriller with Tom Cruise, there’s a great example of a storytelling technique called Chekhov’s Gun.

Named after Anton Chekhov, who advised in letters to young playwrights that“One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.” **The term explains that every element in a story must be necessary, and if it’s not, it should be eliminated from the scene entirely.**

Three times throughout the movie, while Tom Cruise’s character is making his way into his office, there is cotton truck blocking an alleyway. For some odd reason, you hear the voices of the security guard and the driver of the truck going at it louder than you hear other extras on the street. A reference is also made by the security guard that he’s tired of having this conversation with the driver every day, hinting to the viewer that the truck blocking the alley is a regular occurrence.

By the end of the movie, the cotton truck does not seem to have any importance. But true to the essence of Chekhov’s gun, it’s there for a reason.

When Tom Cruise eventually has to make a daring escape from the law firm’s building, he uses the cotton truck to catch his fall after jumping from a third-story window.

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If that truck wasn’t ever there before in the movie, it would be an occurrence of *deus ex machina*, or what happens when a plot is resolved in a very unlikely way.

But knowing the cotton truck was there in both Acts 1 and 2 of the movie, the viewer doesn’t feel like they’re being cheated, and the question every viewer is asking – “Why is the cotton truck parked there every day and why do we hear them yell so much about it,” – is finally resolved.



An example of Chekhov's Gun

From a young age, Spillane loved to read. “When I was a little kid,” he said, “we had moved into a school where there was a library that ran underneath the windows–and I remember the teacher saying, ‘Children, someday you’ll be able to read this book’ and she held up a copy of Moby-Dick. And I said to the teacher, ‘I like this book!’ She says to me, ‘You certainly didn’t read this book!’ And I said, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ She could never get over that!”

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“There are only a certain number of basic plots,” Spillane said. “All stories are an elaboration on these plots and a good background in writing pulp fiction gives you the benefit of stockpiling these elaborations in your mind plus the ability to twist them into elaborations not yet used.” *You have to learn the rules and expectations, so you can break them.


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Late in life, Spillane recalled his comic-book writing days fondly: “They were the happiest days of my life. I could walk anywhere and nobody knew who I was.” Fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

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Sometimes, you just need a lucky break. After a friend took Spillane’s manuscript of I, The Jury to Jack McKenna of Duenewald Printing Corporation who worked with Fawcett Publications, in an intent for McKenna to pass it on to Roscoe Fawcett, McKenna couldn’t find the time to read the manuscript. His wife, however did. “You like detective stories,” McKenna told his wife. “Read this one.” The next morning, McKenna’s wife shook Jack awake. “Read it! This is different.” She read the entire thing the night before. McKenna would become Spillane’s agent.

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Intentionally, Spillane never gave a description of his narrator, Mike Hammer. “If you describe a guy as being six-foot-two, stalwart, big-muscled and dark haired,” Spillane said in 1998, “how can a guy that’s short and fat think that he’s the hero in the story? He can’t do that. But if [Hammer’s] not described, that guy can be the hero in his own mind.”

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Publisher Victor Weybright said, “[T]he literary world abounds in ruined careers in which a poor second book erases all the promise and luster of an initial success.” This came after Spillane showed his second manuscript, For Whom the Gods Would Destroy to the publishers. It wasn’t a bad book, they insisted, just wasn’t the right timing to publish it after how successful I, The Jury had been. So they didn’t reject it, else McKenna would have been able to sell it to someone else. Instead, they shelved it. McKenna’s lack-of-experience showed, because Spillane was given no compensation for this decision.

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During a conversation between Mike Hammer and his creator, Hammer said to Spillane, “Writing’s a good racket, Mickey, all you need is an idea and a typewriter and you’re in business.”

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Use what’s unique to you to create something unique to others. The author writes, “Spillane combined his eclectic reading (including pulp fiction) and life experiences (particularly wartime) with a direct knowledge of the elemental appeal of the comic book into a new style of fiction that excited and pleased a wide swath of the reading public.

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“A perfect book is written with the climax on the last word of the last page,” Spillane said. “…If you took the last word away, you wouldn’t know what the book was about.” His editor, didn’t believe him, so Spillane bet him a thousand bucks that “if he submitted the new Hammer, Vengeance is Mine!, without the last word, the novel would make no sense. “I turned it in without the last word on the last page,” Spillane said grinning. “He said ‘What was the word, what was the word!’ I said, ‘Give me the thousand bucks.’ He gave me the thousand bucks–I gave him the word.” The last sentence of Vengeance is Mine!, of course, is “Juno was a man!”

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The critics didn’t like Spillane’s use of sex and violence in his books, so he used their reviews for his gain. “I have gotten the worst reviews in the world,” he said. “So we made this big ad out of the bad reviews, quoting from them. Then underneath we’d have a line like, this book sold six million copies. The top of the ad said, Mickey Spillane says about his new book, ‘I hope this one gets lousy reviews.’”

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Spillane quickly became one of America’s favorite writers. At a restaurant in Florida Keys where Hemingway’s picture hung up on the wall, Spillane stopped by and was asked for his photo to go up on the wall. On his next visit, Hemingway insisted, “Take him down or take me down.” And down Hemingway went. Later, after Hemingway bad mouthed a Spillane in Bluebook magazine, Spillane was asked what he thought of Hemingway and he responded, “Hemingway who?”

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Victor Saville, a movie director, approached Spillane to make his books into movies. “I arranged a meeting with Spillane,” Saville said. “But not in an office, that was not the Spillane way. He insisted we meet under the clock at the Pennsylvania Railway Station.” A classic detective move, I guess? Their agreement was originally a 50/50 split of the profits, until Columbia Pictures offered Spillane $140,000 cash for four novels. Saville matched the offer, so Spillane went with Saville. Though Spillane chose the right partner, he passed on the better deal. “If Spillane had stuck to my original proposal,” Saville said, “he would have made half a million dollars as his share of the first two pictures.” Apparently, Spillane never really forgave Saville for that, even though it was kind of Spillane’s fault. Part of the deal allowed Saville to have first rights on any new Spillane novels as movies for five years. It didn’t seem like a lot, and to Spillane at the time it didn’t seem to matter, but it would cause a load of headaches in the future for Spillane. Two lessons: Know what you’re signing away and don’t sign away your future.

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Jane Spillane, Mickey’s third wife, said in an interview:

> We would be asleep with nothing but silence in the middle of the night when I would be shaken out of nowhere from the rustling of Mickey getting out of bed, throwing on a lamp and grabbing a sticky note to write down ideas. No matter how many ideas occurred to him in the middle of the night, he would get up every time, turn on the lamp, and write them down on a sticky note. Then a book would result from his midnight musings.


Lesson: Books are made out of sticky notes ([Anne Lamott uses index cards](https://www.dltn.io/posts/book-notes-bird-by-bird-by-anne-lamott))

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Mickey was always remodeling a house he and Jane lived in during his later years because “The guy who built it owned a lumber yard, but he didn’t own a level.” I thought that was a creative way to say it was crooked or it was a shoddy job. You could say something similar about someone who wants to write, but maybe uses basic words, “He liked to write, but it seemed like he didn’t own a dictionary,” or something like that.

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In December of 1972, speaking to Esquire magazine about his clothes, Spillane had an important lesson on spending money: “I own two suits and a sports jacket. Clothes mean little to me.” But he owned “the best driving gear, the best flying gear in the world.” “Clothes,” he said, “were just something you wear in the city.” lesson: spend money on the things you care about.


Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction by Max Collins

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By far, David McCullough has had the strongest influence on my writing, reading, and life. His books are not just books; they are glimpses into a world long gone, glimpses that are near impossible to achieve anywhere else other than between the covers of his books. This makes sense when you look at his advice. Speaking about John Adams and writing his biography, he said, “You’ve got to marinate your head in their time and in their culture. You’ve got to become them in an effect.”

Therefore, I was thrilled to find a documentary on him, **********[David McCullough: Painting with Words](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210345/)**********. Here are some notes.

On the standards he sets for his books, he said:

> I’m starving to write a book that might qualify as literature. That’s the aspiration. I don’t want it just to be readable. I don’t want it just to be interesting. I want it to be something that moves the reader, that moves me.

On the ****one thing**** you should teach children, he said this:

> The great thing about the arts is that you can only learn to do it by doing it. If a child gets that idea, early, that that’s how you learn things, by doing it, that may be the most important thing you can give them. You can’t learn to play the piano by reading a book about how to play the piano. You can’t learn to paint without painting. You have to do it. And in doing it, you suddenly begin to see, “By God I can do this!” And then after awhile “I can not only do this, I’m getting better.
> 

If you were ever confused, McCullough is a ******writer******, not an historian:

> I don’t think of myself as an historian in the conventional understanding of the word. I’m a writer, who has chosen other days from our own - other times - as my field, that’s what I want to write about.
> 

Echoing this later, he said, “I love to tell a story. And I particularly love to tell a true story.”

About the misconceptions people have about history, he said:

> History is not about dates, and quotes, and obscure provisos; history is about life, about change, about consequences, about cause and effect, it’s about the mystery of human nature, the mystery of time. And it isn’t just about politics and the military and social issues - which is almost always the way it’s taught: it’s about music and poetry and drama and science and medicine and money and love.
> 

In the last year of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited John Adams. Emerson afterward wrote down much of what they discussed. He reports that John Adams said “I would to God there be more ambition in the country…” Then he paused and added, “By that I mean ambition of the lottable kind: to excel.” “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” McCullough says while telling this story, “If we could reinstate through what we do as parents, grandparents, as teachers, as legislators, that old noble ambition to excel.”

On success and rewards, McCullough echoes something Robert Oppenheimer understood as well: that the work is the reward.

> The fact that my books are still in print, I suppose I’m prouder of that than anything else. I’ve had a wonderful life, I’ve had a wonderful time, doing what I do. That’s the reward! The work is the reward, the kick of getting back to that typewriter and digging in for another project. That’s what I love. I won’t possibly live long enough to do all the books I want to writer. I have a list of possible books, I thing there’s 27 ideas on the list, so I guess I’ll just have to keep on working. Happily.
>

David McCullough on The Art of Writing, History, and Success

Anne Lamott’s father taught prisoners at San Quentin, and herself, how to write. “But he taught me too,” she writes. “Mostly be example…But while he helped the prisoners and me to discover that we had a lot of feelings and observations and memories and dreams and (God knows) opinions we wanted to share, we all ended up just the tiniest bit resentful when we found the one fly in the ointment: that at some point we had to actually sit down and write.”

And that’s the most important thing about writing. You can read all the books about the craft you wanted, write down all the notes and plots and storylines you want, but unless you sit down in a chair and write word after word after word, you won’t be successful.

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Lamott’s dad: “This is the great tragedy of California, for a life orientated to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death–the greatest leisure of life.”

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Lamott: “I read more than other kids; I luxuriated in books. Books were my refuge.

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********************************************************************************Publication is not all that great. It will not solve all of your problems.********************************************************************************

“I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do–the actual act of writing–turns out to be the best part…The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.”

> The problem that comes up over and over again is that these people want to be published. They ****kind**** of want to write, but they ******really****** want to be published. You’ll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them.
>

> Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram–it’s the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar. What’s real is that if you do your scales every day, if you slowly try harder and harder pieces, if you listen to great musicians play music you’ll love, you’ll get better.
>

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> ‘But how?’ my students ask. “How do you actually do it?”

You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You look at the cieling, and over at the clock, yawn and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind–a scene, a locale, a character, whatever–and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys.
>

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“If I sit there long enough, something will happen.”

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“’E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.”

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When Lamott was a child, and her older, then then year old brother had a report on birs due the next day that he’d have three months to write, yet hasn’t started, was in tears at the kitchen table, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, “immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.” Then, her father sat down and with his arm around his young boy said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

She keeps telling this story because it gives others hope, and hope, she quotes Chesterton, “is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.”

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Write shitty first drafts. “The only way I can get anything written is to write really, really shitty first drafts…Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts…A friend of mine says the first draft is the down draft–you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft–you fix it up.

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“One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, ‘It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do–you can either type of kill yourself.’”

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A great way to write: take short assignments and then produce really shitty first drafts of those assignments.

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**********On characters:**********

- “As soon as you start protecting your characters from the ramifications of their less-than-lofty behavior, your story will start to feel flat and pointless, just like in real life.”
- “One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a new way that pages of description can’t. How would your main characters describe their current circumstances to a close friend, before and then after a few drinks?”
- Have a great narrator! That was Ethan Canin’s advice to Lamott. She explains, “If your narrator is someone whose take on things fascinates you, it isn’t really going to matter if nothing much happens for a long time…Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud, whose lines you always want to steal.”

****************On plot:****************

- Plot grows out of character. Don’t force your characters into a plot. Let the plot develop based on what all of the different characters do.
- “For the climax, there must be a killing or a healing or a domination. It can be a real killing, a murder, or it can be a killing of the spirit, or of something terrible inside one’s soul, or it can be a killing of a deadness within, after which the person becomes alive again.”
- Alice Adams uses the ABCDE formula when writing short stories. Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending.
- If you’re stuck, write a plot treatment. After going through rounds and rounds of edits with her editor, Lamott still didn’t have a working book. So her editor said, “Listen. I want you to write that book you just described to me. You haven’t done it here. Go off somewhere and write me a treatment, a plot treatment. Tell me chapter by chapter what you just told me in the last half hour…”

************************On Dialogue:************************

- “You’re not reproducing actual speech–you’re translating the sound and rhythm of what a character says into words.”
- “If you’re a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days–listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you’ve taken in, all that you’ve overheard, and turn it into gold.
- You ********must******** be able to identify a character by what he or she says. Each one must sound different from the others. “And they should all not sound like you.”
- “Good dialogue gives us the sense that we are eavesdropping, that the author is not getting in the way. Thus good dialogue encompasses both what is said and what is not said.”
- “You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should *******confirm******* what you’ve observed in the world.”

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As a writer, you don’t ever really know when you’re done with writing something. When you’ve toiled and edited and rewritten and agonized over it and when the person who reads your work says “Not bad” then it’s done. “Writing and editing is like putting an octopus to bed.” “If you know that there is simply no more steam in the pressure cooker and that it’s the very best you can do for now–well? I think this means that you are done.”

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“Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on.”

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“If you find that you start a number of stories or pieces that you don’t ever bother finishing, that you lose interest or faith in them along the way, it may be that there is nothing at their center about which you care passionately.”

“If your deepest beliefs drive your writing, they will not only keep your work from being contrived but will help you discover what drives your characters.”

“To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.”

“Tell the truth and write about freedom and fight for it, however you can, and you will be richly rewarded.”

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“There’s an old Mel Brooks routine, on the flip side of the “2,000 year old man” where the psychiatrist tells his patient, “Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.” It means of course, that when you don’t know what to do, when you don’t know whether your character would do this or that, you get quiet and try to hear that still small voice inside.”

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“My friend Terry says that when you need to make a decision, in your work or otherwise, and you don’t know what to do, just do one thing or the other, because the worst that can happen is that you will have made a terrible mistake…If you don’t know which way to go, keep it simple. Listen to your broccoli. Maybe it will know what to do. Then, if you’ve worked in good faith for a couple of hours but cannot hear it today, have some lunch.”

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“A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost.” – Henry James

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“Hostile, aggressive students insist on asking what I **do** with all my index cards. And all I can say is that I have them, I took notes on them, and the act of having written something down gives me a fifty-fifty shot at having it filed away now in my memory.”

“When I get stuck or lost…I’ll look through my index cards. I try to see if there’s a short assignment on any of them that will get me writing again, give me a small sense of confidence, **help me put down one damn word after another**.”

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Writing groups are good, but they require people to respond to their work as honestly as possible but without being “abusive or diminishing…You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.”

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“When you don’t know what else to do, when you’re really stuck and filled with despair and self-loathing and boredom, but you can’t just leave your work alone for a while and wait, you might try telling part of your history–part of a character’s history–in the form of a letter. The letter’s informality just might free you form the tyranny of perfectionism.”

“Here’s the thing, though. I no longer think of it as block. I think that is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have a problem with your door. The word *****block***** suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you’re empty.”

******Problems of output are problems of input.******

“The problem is acceptance, which is something we’re taught not to do. We’re taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, to alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given–that you are not in a productive creative period–you free yourself to being filling up again. I encourage my students at times like these to get one page of anything written…just for the hell of it, just because they have made a commitment to try to write three hundred words every day. Then, on bad days and weeks, let things go at that.”

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When young writers emulate famous ones who came before, they’re getting that style on loan until they can develop and find the thing they’re really after: their own voice.

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“You wouldn’t be a writer if reading hadn’t enriched your soul more than other pursuits.”

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“I tell you, if what you have in mind is fame and fortune, publication is going to drive you crazy.”

But there is something good that comes from publication. “Publication is the acknowledgment from the community that you did you writing right. You acquire a rank that you never lose…But eventually you have to sit down like every other writer and face the blank page.”

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“Sometime later you’ll find yourself at work on, maybe really into, another book, and once again you figure out that the real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.”

******************************************************************************You have to love the work. Focus on effort, not results.******************************************************************************

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Coach to Cool Runnings team: “if you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.”

If you’re not enough before the publication, the reward, or the recognition, you won’t be enough with it either.”

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When Lamott went to see a pastor because she was “up and down, scattered, high, withdrawing, lost, and in the midst of it all trying to find some elusive sense of serenity,” he told her, “The world can’t give you that serenity. The world can’t give us peace. We can only find it in our hearts.”

“I hate that,” Lamott replied.

“I know,” he said. “But the good news is that by the same token, the world can’t take it away.”

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“[My students] will not get big houses and stuff, though many of them want these things more than anything else. They don’t believe that if they got these things they’d probably end up even more mentally ill and full of stress and self-doubt than they already are…When I suggest, however, that devotion and commitment will be their own reward, that in dedication to their craft they will find solace and direction and wisdom and truth and pride, they at first look at me with great hostility. You might think that I had just offered them membership in my embroidery club. They are angry people. This is why they write.”

---

“Becoming a writer can also profoundly change your life as a reader. One reads with a deeper appreciation and concentration, knowing now how hard writing is, especially how hard it is to make it look effortless. You begin to read with a writer’s eyes. You focus in a new way. You study how someone portrays his or her version of things in a way that is new and bold and original. You notice how a writer paints in a mesmerizing character or era for you, without your having the sense of being given a whole lot of information, you may actually put the book down for a moment and savor it, just taste it.”

---

When you’ve finished a book, you’ve finished a book! It doesn’t matter how it sells or who reads it. You’ve gone and done it. Day after day you wrote and finished a book.

---

Writing is like “singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”


Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Even after writing 355 books over a span of 50 years, [Isaac Asimov](https://www.dltn.io/posts/june-05-2023-isaac-asimov-on-writing) said he never experienced writer's block. His trick? Working on several projects at a time. So if he gets bored of one he simply starts working on another.

> Fortunately I’m never without several projects in mind so that if I wake up in the morning, I’m sick and tired of what I’m doing, I do something else.
> 

Haruki Murakami practiced [something similar](https://www.dltn.io/posts/novelist-as-a-vocation):

> I have been writing fiction for more than thirty-five years at the time of this book’s writing; yet I have never experienced what is commonly known as ‘writer’s block.’ Wanting to write but being unable is unknown to me. That may make it sound as if I am overflowing with talent, but the actual reason is much simpler: I never write unless I really want to, unless the desire to write is overwhelming. When I feel that desire, I sit down and set to work. When I don’t feel it, I usually turn to translating from English. Since translation is essentially a technical operation, I can pursue it on a daily basis, quite separate from my creative desire; yet at the same time, it is a good way to hone my writing skills.
> 

[Austin Kleon](https://rainmaker.fm/audio/writer/austin-kleon-file-one/) also practices this habit. He calls it “productive procrastination.”

> **Kelton Reid:** I like that. You talk about ‘productive procrastination’ quite a bit, and you’ve written about it. Do you have some best practices for beating procrastination yourself?

**Austin Kleon:** Yes. The best thing to do is to practice what you said, productive procrastination, which means have one or two or three things going all at the same time. When you get sick of one thing, you can work on the other thing because you hate the other project so much. Then when you get sick of project two, you can move back to project one. You have to work, but you basically use procrastination as a way to get things done.
> 

I recommend the same advice to people [who want to read more](https://www.dltn.io/posts/read). It’s much easier to read three or four books at once than it is to read one because when you’re bored of one, you can just pick up another. But if you are only reading one at a time and get bored, well what you do is stop reading.

Beat writer’s block

I spent the afternoon walking around the Hoover Institute at Stanford University today. My mission was to find and a piece of a lifeboat from the RMS **********Lusitania**********. While reading *******Dead Wake******* by Erik Larson, I learned it was there.

I was disappointed, though, because I had to come back with an appointment. Just to make sure I was in the right spot, I DMed Larson on Twitter. He confirmed that I was but yes, I did in fact need an appointment.

The first book of Larson’s I read was ***************************The Devil in the White City***************************, an extravagant tale of murder, mystery, and mayhem at the Chicago World’s Fair. I followed that up with *************************The Splendid and the Vile*************************, which easily became one of the best books I’ve ever read. Next came **********Dead Wake**********.

Larson writes a particular style of books called narrative non-fiction. Everything in the book is true, but it reads like a novel. His books opened my eyes to a new style of reading and writing, and are the reason I want to write narrative non-fiction myself. In fact, I’m currently pursuing a Masters degree in English and Creative Writing with a non-fiction emphasis, much to the prompting of his books.

[Larson believes](https://lithub.com/erik-larson-on-finding-a-new-angle-on-history/) there’s always a new way to tell an old story. At breakfast with the director of the International Churchill Society, Larson explains he was dubiously questioned about his motivations for adding yet another Churchill biography. “Well, look,” he said, “It’s all in the telling.

> I wanted to write about how the Churchill family and their close advisers—who were like family—how they actually got through the Blitz, day to day, in that first year of his prime ministry, which happened to coincide with the first year of, and most important year of, the German air campaign. I wanted to know how these guys did it on a day-to-day basis, and their families—what they had for dinner and all that.
>

The narrative began to take shape when Larson received access to Churchill’s daughter’s diary. Mary, who was 17-years-old at the time, Larson explained, “[L]iked to have fun. You know, she liked to go to dances with the RAF guys; a couple of times she mentions snogging in the hay loft. That was exactly what I was trying to get at, was, how did people actually do it, how did they cope?”

That was one thing I was most delighted to read in *************************The Splendid and the Vile*************************. The diary entires addressed the same timeless ideas of love and hate, things we all still journal about today.

Mary, who in the midst of the Blitz was being courted by a young soldier, opened her heart to her journal. After meeting him, she wrote, “Now–Mary–take a hold on yourself–my little plum.”

After getting a letter from him asking her out to dinner, she simply wrote: “Oh heaven.”

The following Sunday, he called her. They spoke for twenty minutes. “He is v. charming I think & has a very beautiful voice,” she wrote. “Oh dear–have I fallen, or have I?”

Through his writing, Larson helps the reader realize how normal and simple people acted, even in the midst of utter chaos. “I think one thing that guides me is that I often look for things that tie us, in the present, to people in the past,” he said. “Things that make us realize that, you know, we aren’t so different now in how we feel about things, and what we do, and the things that move us. Anything that ties us to the past, I think, is a good thing.”


Telling old stories in new ways

After starting [Foundation](https://twitter.com/dltnio/status/1665743018257793024?s=20) on Apple TV (I’m late, I know), I became interested in Isaac Asimov. I had a vague idea that he was an influential writer, but for what and why, I was ignorant.

Turns out, he’s fascinating.

When I want to learn about something or someone, like any great scholar, I [use Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov).

Here’s his analysis of the insanity that is being a full-time writer:

> [T]he only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes.
> 

In [an interview in 1975](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUz_KkibYAs), after being asked about the sheer absurdity of the fact that Asimov is afraid of airplanes even though he writes about going to the ends of the earth, he drops an incredible line:

> I don't like to travel, it keeps me away from my typewriter.
> 

Earlier in the same interview, he says:

> What it amounts to [being able to write so much], is that I’m not happy except when I’m writing. It’s almost the only way I can think of to spend my time pleasantly, and so I’m naturally drawn to the typewriter at all times. The day is lost in which I don’t type.
> 

His writing style is focused on simplicity, much to the dismay of science-fiction critics:

> I have an informal style, which means I tend to use short words and simple sentence structure, to say nothing of occasional colloquialisms. This grates on people who like things that are poetic, weighty, complex, and, above all, obscure. On the other hand, the informal style pleases people who enjoy the sensation of reading an essay without being aware that they are reading and of feeling that ideas are flowing from the writer's brain into their own without mental friction.
> 

Naturally, people wanted to know how one man was capable of writing over 200 books throughout his lifetime. In 1980, [David Letterman asked](https://youtu.be/365kJOsFd3w), “What kind of schedule do you put in to write that many books?”

> I get up in the morning, sit down and write, when I finish writing, go back to bed.
> 

Asimov not only understood the power of writing; he preached on the benefits of reading too. On March 16, 1971, he sent this letter congratulating the recipients on a new library:

![5692290321_36e10b9b35_o.webp](Isaac%20Asimov%20on%20writing%20and%20reading%20ba64171fc84d4195b08122826b364155/5692290321_36e10b9b35_o.webp)

Isaac Asimov on writing and reading

![StFeSAMPLE.jpg](Write%20stuff%20down%20fbdc2f1d21e545b8a2e7a676797f5648/StFeSAMPLE.jpg)

Aboard the HMS ******Beagle****** in 1831, Charles Darwin began journaling.

He never stopped.

He’d take a pencil and paper into the field with him and jot down observations and ideas. When he was back on board, he’d then copy those quick drawings into his notebooks with a pen. He typically did so after lunch along with his captain, Robert FitzRoy.

Darwin wrote:

> Let the collector’s motto be ‘Trust nothing to memory;’ for the memory becomes a fickle guardian when one interesting object is succeeded by another still more interesting.”
>

Darwin explains that a naturalist must take “copious notes,” not for publication, but for himself. Referencing Bacon, he says, “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and *************writing an exact man.”*************

Here are what some entries say:

> Solitude on board enervating heat comfort hard to look forward pleasures in prospect do not wish for cold night [delicious] sea calm sky not blue.
>

> Always think of home
>

> Nobody knows pleasure of reading till a few days of such indolence
>

The notebooks also include over 300 sketches and doodles.


Write stuff down

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Whenever great artists talk about their craft, I pay attention. The meta-analyses on why they do what they do (and how) is refreshing because there is rarely a trick. There’s no praying to a special creative god to give them powers or spell they cast on their typewriter. It’s often that they just show up, work, leave, and repeat.

This is why it’s hard to learn about how great writers write, because even ****they**** don’t know. To them, they just write. Maybe they assume that it’s just what everyone does, so why bore people with the details?

Sometimes, though, we do get a peek behind the curtain. Such was the case in Annie Dillard’s short and sporadic reflections on writing in her book, “The Writing Life.”

Speaking on the importance of a daily routine, she writes:

> ”How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim…A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order–willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”
>

Having a good day is of the utmost importance because good days make a good life:

> “There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur’s life a good one, or Thomas Mann’s?”
>

Pair this with an [analysis on the life of Albert Einstein](https://www.dltn.io/posts/albert-einstein).


Annie Dillard’s Advice on Keeping a Daily Routine

Working by Robert Caro

## Impressions

In *****************************[Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lasts](https://a.co/d/e5BJxTb)*****************************, Ryan Holiday creates a playbook for writers, creators, and artists to make exceptional work and get noticed. And yes, those are two ********sep********a********rate******** skills.

Creating great work is hard and takes time, but so is getting that work in front of other people. But, don’t think just because you’ve captured attention means your work will sell ([look at this example](https://www.insider.com/instagrammer-arii-2-million-followers-cannot-sell-36-t-shirts-2019-5) of someone who had 2 million followers and couldn’t sell more than 50 items).

Creating work that lasts and marketing that work is two sides of the same coin. To create a true ****************perennial seller****************, both skills are needed. You’ll learn the perfect formula for doing so in this book.

## Notes

### You can’t want to make something timeless, and then focus on metrics that aren’t

Holiday writes, “People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds.” Writers and business leaders ******want****** to create something that lasts a long time, but then agonize over social media followers and blog views–things that are pointless. People say they want to create timeless work, but then spend energy trying to figure out how to make their post go viral instead of how to make sure it lasts for 15 years. There’s a fundamental flaw there in the logic. “If you focus on near-term growth above everything else,” investor Peter Thiel writes, “you miss the most important question you should be asking: Will this business still be around a decade from now?”

### Perennial, defined

A perennial seller is something that, over time, has continued success and finds an audience that loves the product, whatever it is. Perennial’s aren’t defined by their initial success, because the initial success is irrelevant if it’s going to last for 20 years.

### The true act of creation is to make things that last

“The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” – Cyril Connolly

### If you want great marketing, start with a great product

No one who spends 1/4 of the time making and 4/5 of the time marketing will be a perennial seller. ******Making****** something worth buying, writing something worth reading is the first (and fundamental step) to creating timeless work. “The better your product is, the better your marketing will be. The worse it is, the more time you will have to spend marketing and the less effective every minute of that marketing will be.” Phil Libin, the co-founder of Evernote says, “People [who are] thinking about things other than making the best product never make the best product.” You start by *******wanting******* to make the best product.

### Ideas are worthless

********Everyone******** has ideas. Ideas for “the next big thing,” ideas for a book, ideas for how they want to turn their life around. But ideas are worthless. They mean nothing to the world. “The difference between a great work and an ****idea**** for a great work is all the sweat, time, effort, and agony that go into engaging that idea and turning it into something real. “Lots of people,” Austin Kleon says, “want to be the noun without doing the verb.”

### Work on things that last (and don’t hurry)

As famous astronaut Jeff Bezos put it, “Focus on things that don’t change.” You can’t expect something to last if it’s built on top of, explains, or piggybacks off something that ********doesn’t******** last or is constantly changing.

The beautiful thing about writing and creating timeless stuff is that you don’t have to hurry. You’re not trend-chasing. If the thing is *****truly***** timeless, whether it comes out next month or in two years shouldn’t matter; it should be equally relevant. So take your time and make it great. “It’s better to play the longer game,” Holiday writes. “Leave behind the hype and ephemeral infatuations for the time capsule and the one-hit wonders.” 

### Great work is created little by little

“You don’t have to be a genius to make genius–you just have to have small moments of brilliance and edit out the boring stuff.”

### Inspiration is a function of doing the work

“Getting into action generates inspiration. Don’t cop out waiting for inspiration to get you back into action. It won’t!” – Robert Evans | Planning a project is important, but don’t get so bogged down in the details you forget to do the work. Plus, no matter how *******perfect******* the plan is, it’s just an idea if you don’t actually do the work on it. And remember what we said earlier about ideas?

### You have to know who your project is for (and who it’s not for)

Charlie Rose asked the creator of ********Hamilton********, Lin-Manuel Miranda, what set him apart from other kids he went to school with. Miranda replied, “Cause I picked a lane and I started running ahead of everyone else…” If you don’t know who you’re making something for, how do you know you’ve successfully created something? If you can’t identify who will buy your thing, why do you expect ******anyone****** to buy your thing?

### Project brief: One sentence, one paragraph, one page

For every new project or creative endeavor write out exactly what your project is supposed to be, who it’s supposed to help, and what it’s supposed to do in one sentence, one paragraph, and one page. What are the things that matter and what are the things that don’t?

This is a _________ that does _______. This helps people __________.

************What is it?************ Is it a modern piece of experimental art? Is it a low-budget YouTube video with friends? What genre is it in? Brain Koppelman, screenwriter and creator of ********Billions********, told Seth Godin, “Everything that has a clear path to commercial success is in a genre.”

Jon Favreau, when dreaming up ********Iron Man********, said in an interview once that his vision depended entirely in Robert Downey Jr. being Iron Man. Everything else–actors, set, story–revolved around him.

You must do this because, a Holiday writes, “An unaimed arrow rarely hits a target.”

Holiday’s “book about Stoic philosophy,” became, for an elevator pitch, “a book that uses the ancient formula of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius to teach people how to not only overcome obstacles but **********************thrive because of them**********************.”

### Packaging matters

“A great package on a great product is what creates an explosive reaction,” Holiday writes. ******************Catcher in the Rye****************** sold well when it was first published, but sold over 1.25 million copies in the early pulp paperback edition. The cover was provocative and the blurb sucked you in: “This unusual book may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart–but you will never forget it!”

### You must stay focused (distraction is tempting)

“Nothing has sunk more creators and caused more unhappiness than this,” Holiday writes, “our inherently human tendency to pursue a strategy aimed at accomplishing one goal while simultaneously expecting to achieve other goals entirely unrelated.” If you want to create a new way of doing a non-profit, you can’t also expect to chase a big payday (and succeed). Seneca writes one must have, “confidence in yourself and the belief that you are on the right path, and not led astray by the many tracks which cross yours of people who are hopelessly lost, though some are wandering not far from the true path.” If you want to create a piece of timeless art, you can’t compare yourself to the people who are trying to get a billboard ranking next week or who are playing a different game altogether. A decade from now, you’re going to wish you stuck it out and kept pursuing the hard thing. 

### Anything that gets or keeps customers is marketing

Anything you do that creates new customers or keeps old ones is marketing: giving away a free chapter in a book, showing up to a local event and sponsoring it, signing books at a local book store, signing people’s emails up by hand.

### Piracy is better than obscurity

Don’t be fooled into thinking your content or thing is so special that it can’t be given away for free. Tim O’Reilly said it best when he said, “The problem for most artists isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.” Holiday continues, “we spend a lot of time insisting that nobody steal our work or get it for free…but we forget that being ******unknown****** is a far worse fate for an artist than being underpaid.” Cory Doctrow, a blogger and science-fiction author gripes on the same point: “Although it’s hard to turn fame into money in the arts, it’s impossible to turn obscurity into money in the arts.” This is especially true if you have another, high price paid offer like consulting or a course. If just one session of consultation or a speaking gig gets booked from free content, it’s worth it.

### “Trade up the chain”

It’s tempting to want to start out on the biggest media outlet you can get, but it’s often smart to start small. Most outlets pick up stories from smaller ones. “By starting with a small podcast where I could tell the story on my own terms,” Holiday explains, “led to a pickup on a small site that covers a niche, and then sharing and spreading that piece out so it was seen by the right people, I was able to ultimately go from a tiny show to one of the biggest and most influential outlets in the world.”

### When in doubt, “newsjack”

The idea of “newsjacking” was popularized by David Meerman Scott and he defines it as “the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business.” When everyone is talking about X, position yourself and your product to also talk about X.

Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday

There’s a saying, “Done is better than perfect.” Some artists live by that phrase. Others criticize it. They think it gives people a hall pass to create shoddy work. But those people don’t know what they’re talking about (and their unaccomplished desire to create something meaningful also plagues them).

“Done is better than perfect” is the mindset for the first draft, not the final piece. It’s easier to edit something that already exists than to come up with something new.

Neil Gaiman encourages young writers to just get started, saying, “Anything you do can be fixed. What you can’t fix is the perfection of a blank page or the unsullied whiteness of a blank screen.”

Starting is important because unattempted greatness will always leave you feeling like the 45-year-old high school quarterback who missed their big break. Thing is, you haven’t missed yours yet.

In How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Arnold Bennett warns: ”Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish [to do something great], the sense of uneasy waiting for something to start which has not started will remain to disturb the peace of the soul.”

Get something on the page.

Just get something on the page

After [his latest piece started circling on Twitter](https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/new-avenues/), I went down a rabbit hole on Robin Sloan’s [website](https://www.robinsloan.com/). It’s not how I intended my morning to be spent, but I’m not mad about it. Many of his posts helped clarify my approach to writing online and the direction I’m taking in the new year with this blog/newsletter thingy.

In a post called “[Thinking, Not Replying](https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/thinking-not-replying/),” Robin quotes an article about climate policy where the author writes:

> In fact, Aklin and Mildenberger say, climate change is a distributive-conflict problem—a term that was new to me and that I will now explain. In essence, climate policy restructures the economy, creating new economic winners and losers. [Etc.]
>

Robin continued:

> I nearly gasped at “a term that was new to me and that I will now explain”. Consider a few things:

How easy it would have been to omit. “Climate change is a distributive-conflict problem. In essence, climate policy restructures the economy … ” Pretty normal.

How it transforms Rob from “explainer” to “thinker-alongside”.

How bloggy it sounds! Can you detect that, too? I know not all blogs — not even most — were models of “thinking in public”; the blogosphere was thick with pedantry. At the same time, there was something about the format that seemed to invite a generous, generative approach.
>

I want to talk about the second thing he considers about how easy it would have been to say, “…In essence climate policy…” and omit completely the phrase “a term that was new to me and that I will now explain.”

In most of those posts like that, the author doesn’t admit to not knowing something they’re writing about. It’s also surprising that it was in an article from *The Atlantic* and not a Blogspot blog written by an economics professor who is exploring climate policy.

Robin continues down a tangentially related line of inquiry about how online discourse is *always replying, never thinking*. I concur with that observation. Thinking aloud online is nearly impossible because most people read something you say and then slap a label on you.

Once they see you through the lens of that label, they assume you believe everything that comes with wearing it. This turns what could be a helpful intellectual discourse into an online boxing match in the comments. Since that’s not helpful for anyone, the people who would ***enjoy*** having an intellectual discourse steer clear of the comments section, letting the online boxers populate and litter what could be a beautiful back-and-forth exchange of ***thinking.***

---

In a post called “[The Thing About Blogging Is](https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/things-you-love/),” Robin writes:

> The thing about blogging is, you can just write about the things you love. A “professional” “critic” (scare quotes because who even knows what words mean anymore) has to do something else, something more difficult: manage a kind of unfolding … aesthetic … worldview? Balance one thing against the other? A blogger suffers no such burden. A blogger can simply

1. love a thing, and
2. write about it.
>

…and that’s what I love about blogging.

In this weird newsletter era of online writing, I’ve been hesitant to embrace the idea of writing a newsletter because, typically, to gain a readership, an audience has to be able to put your work in a box.

*Oh, you write about finance? Okay, I like finance. Sure I’ll subscribe to you even though I don’t know you because I’m interested in your niche.*

And that’s the thing about niches. They provide a box for a potential reader to put you in until they trust you. But once they do, the box goes out the window. You become “just a finance writer” that they enjoy to “a writer” that they like.

I suspect that’s why everyone says to “pick a niche.” That has to be one of the most popular pieces of advice to aspiring creators, but I haven’t seen an analysis about ***why*** it works–and it does work.

But to hell with a niche.

I don’t want to be put into a box. I want to love a thing–or hate a thing–and then write about it. Will my blog go viral? Probably not, but it’s not unheard of.

When a blog gets posted to Hacker News, the quality and content of *that* post are what people care about. Since it’s ranked high enough on a site trusted by millions, the “trust” factor that a niche provides is no longer relevant. It doesn’t matter what else you’ve written about because **this** is the post that made it to the front page of Hacker News. **This** is the post that your favorite writer tweeted out.

So it all goes back to a question of quantity vs. quality debate. Will a blog that posts garbage every day ever make it to the front page of Hacker News? Not in a good way.

Will a blog that posts inconsistent bangers make it to the front page of Hacker News? Most likely.

The question then has to be asked, “Okay, what game are you trying to play?”

As I’ve said in my welcome email to the Substack portion of this blog, I’m not trying to build a career writing online. Not yet, at least. I’m content with my video editing job, learning programming, and writing about those things.

I write because I want to write. Because whenever I come across a uniquely designed website online (like [this](https://maya.land/) or [this](https://www.kickscondor.com/all/) or [this](https://www.gwern.net/)), I think ***that’s what I want***. I want my blog to be a treasure trove of interesting nuggets. I want someone to go down a rabbit hole on my blog and write a response about it.

Getting on the front page of Hacker News isn’t a goal for me. Would it be nice? Of course! But I’d rather connect with 5-10 people building their own custom blogs and exploring their unique world through it. I want to collaborate with other curious individuals—folks who are more concerned with **why** something happens rather than forming an opinion about it.

The blogosphere needs to live on. Bring back nicheless posts, category tags in the sidebar, monthly archives, and “contra” responses Huzzah!


Thinking About Blogging

## Takeaways
-   Writing is the art of using the English language in a way that will achieve the most strength and least clutter.
-   Must constantly ask yourself, 'What am I trying to say?' and say that.
-   School has taught us to use fancy words, jargon, and long transition phrases. Basically anything you learned in school about how to write, do the opposite. People want to know what you're saying in the least amount of words possible.
-   Get rid of every word that doesn't need to be there.
-   **Clutter is the language people speak when they're too scared to say what they mean.**
-   Never use, "I think," "I want to note," "I believe," etc. We know you think it, you're writing it.
-   When you're re-reading your rough draft, try bracketing the words that aren't doing anything. If the sentence still makes sense, ditch those words in the final draft.
-   Style can't be taught or learned, but don't force yourself to sound fancy.
-   Writing is all about sounding personal, but if you want to stay out of the first person, use "I" in the rough draft and replace them in the final draft.
-   There is no audience, you're writing for yourself.
-   If you find something amusing, add it. If you want to go on a tangent, do it. Again, writing is all about sounding personal. Someone has probably written something the way you have, but not with your style, examples, or tangents.
-   Cliche phrases, metaphors, etc., **are to never be used. It's lazy writing.**
-   Use _Websters Dictionary, Second College Edition,_ _Websters Dictionary of Synonyms,_ and _Rogets Thesaurus_ to make sure the word you chose actually means what you said it does. You can save a lot of space simply by using the right word.
-   Use new words if they fill a good need and help you express something you otherwise couldn't. If they don't, never use them again.
-   Separate usage from jargon.
-   Before WWII, people wanted novels and stories. But after Pearl Harbor, people just wanted to know what the hell was going on. They wanted facts, quotes, numbers, etc.
-   Before you start writing, be sure to choose which tone you want to use.
-   Ask yourself:
    -   How will I address the reader?
    -   What tense will I use?
    -   What style do I want to write in?
-   Every piece of non-fiction should leave the reader with one, just one, provocative thought he didn't have before he read the piece.
-   Try to give an extra twist to the last sentence in each paragraph. For example:

    > *I've often wondered what goes into a hot dog. Now I wish I didn't.

    My trouble began when the Department of Agriculture published...– In other words, can a chickenfurter find happiness in the land of the frank?*

-   Always collect more material than you think you will use and don't lead the reader get away. Make sure each sentence begs the reader to read the next.
-   If you've explained the facts and made the point you want to make, just stop.
-   Pick something crazy or a quote that's funny to surprise the readers with as the last sentence to your piece.
-   If a place comes to you easy, don't use it. It's most likely a cliche.
-   Eliminate every fact that is a known attribute. You don't need to use a simile to explain how hot and dry Death Valley was, people know that.
-   Distill the important information from the immaterial.

**Verbs**
-   Use short words. Of the 701 words in Lincoln's inaugural address, 505 are one syllable.

**Adverbs**
-   Most adverbs are unnecessary.
-   Don't write, "The radio blared loudly." Blared means it was loud.

**Adjectives**
-   Most are also unnecessary. "Brown dirt." Duh, dirt is brown.

**Qualifiers**
-   Don't use "sort of," "kind of," "a little," etc.
-   Tell the reader as early as you can that you're switching gears.
-   Use "but," "yet," "nevertheless," at the beginning of the sentence to replace what the reader was about to do.
-   Despite what you were taught in school, **you can start a sentence with "but."**
-   Newspaper paragraphs shouldn't have more than 2-3 sentences.
-   **The quickest fix to any sentence is to get rid of it.**

### Science and Technical Writing
-   If you're struggling trying to come up with simple writing, write about how something works. This is great practice for ordering your thoughts sequentially.
-   Imagine technical writing to be like an upside-down pyramid. Start with the first fact the reader must know to understand something and follow that pattern.

### Business and Professional Writing
-   Say what you want to say. Don't murk it up with big words trying to sound "professional."
-   The way to warm up almost any institution is to locate the missing "I" in the memos, reports, documents, writings, and so on.

## Quotes
- "The man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is a fool."
- "Ultimately, the product that any writer has to sell is not his subject, but himself."
- "The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components."
- "A clear sentence is no accident."
- "Writing improves with the direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out that shouldn't be there" (I recognize the irony of this.)
- "Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide its mistakes."
- "Leaders who bob and weave [with their words], don't inspire confidence."
- "Surprise is one of the most refreshing commodities in writing."
- "Beauty as we understand it, and as we admire it in nature, is never arbitrary."
- "A simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking; A muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too dumb or too lazy to organize his thoughts."


On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Summary
-------

This book is very helpful for anyone who wants to get into freelance or agency marketing. It gives some practical writing advice, but it's mainly tips and strategies on how to create good campaigns inside of an agency.

Outline
-------

### Chapter 2: Writing, Rewriting, and Re-Writing

The majority of our job is not coming up with great ideas. It's crafting the words and art around other people's ideas to make them great.

How to Write Headlines:

-   Sit in front of the page and write line after line after line in quick succession until your lines are loosely connected to where you started.
-   Once you get that perfect line, rewrite in 20 different ways. Flop the structure, start with the verb. Start with the noun.

Advertising has killed these words. Use them sparingly:

-   Perfect
-   Unique
-   Intersting
-   New
-   No Wonder
-   Special
-   Not to Mention
-   That's Why
-   First
-   Only
-   Exclusive
-   Special
-   No Matter

Before you put pen to paper, think about how you're going to say what you're going to say. British voiceover?

Don't EVER use these words in headlines:

-   Like
-   Stuff
-   Things

Never let people guess the next word you're going to use.

Create tension with headlines. Example:

-   Dull line: Take your work out of the office with a mobile broadband card.
-   Line with Tension: The office is no place to work.

#### How to Steal Headlines Like a Pro:

1\. Find a well-known saying and twist it.

-   "Start acting your *younger* age"
-   "Make your long story look short"

2\. Be bland, then play with it

-   This: Great signal in Kansas City.
-   Becomes this: KC's drenched in our sweet and tangy signal sauce

3\. Take the crappy line from a creative brief and make it not crappy

4\. Big small/High low

-   Finding a parallel you can make in the language between opposites
-   "Small Rates. Big Deal."
-   "Pay a little, get a lot."
-   "Giant horsepower. Tiny Price."

5\. Duck. Duck. Goose

-   Two quick thoughts followed by one longer thought
-   "It's this. It's that. It's going to change the way you do this forever"
-   "Word, word, word, twist."

### Chapter 3: More Words? You've got to be kidding. (Body copy and other longer form writing)

Don't make body copy an explanation for the headline. If that's the case, the headline isn't clear enough.

Think title & story. The title hints at what you're about to read, the story is what you read.

Write the body first, then think of the headline.

To properly write body copy for a product, the product must solve a problem or be a resolution to some situation. The first part of this process is defining that conflict.

Logic and order come more in the editing page. For now, just keep writing content.

One of the fastest ways to class up your language is to use VERB NOUN:

-   Hammer away.
-   Feather past
-   Anchor in.

Be specific.

If a story doesn't seem right, consider a convincing argument.

-   Logos - Does this make sense?
-   Pathos - Is there emotion? What is the reader feeling?
-   Ethos - Who are you and why should I care?

Rule #1 - Is this something you'd want to read? If not, I don't want to read it either.

### Chapter 4: TV or online video

The script will be a lot more attractive to a director if you let them put their own mark on it

Think through your choices very well

Trust your gut and other people's, but be wary of logical explanations for errors. No person will be there to explain to ever home viewer why it is the way it is.

### Chapter 5: Digital, social, and all of that

Put yourself in the role of the first time viewer. Does the single post make sense, even though they haven't seen the rest of the campaign?

When brainstorming, think of what you want people to take away from the campaign. List them out and start from there.

If your tone is funny, it has to be funny from the banner on Twitter to the About Us page on the website.

Some of the best digital experiences mimic the physical world or work on top it. Try to make digital less digital.

Read copy aloud. If a joke is supposed to be a punchline, have that line come up delayed.

If you're asking anyone to do something that's more difficult than lifting a feather, they won't do it.

As much as you can, don't make anyone click or tap through an ad. You lose people that way.

When optimizing for SEO, think like a person trying to find you. Not the words you think represent you or the brand.

### Chapter 6: Experimental Marketing

There's something unique about warped scale. A building is boring, but a shrunken building is cool. A thumbtack is lame, but a giant thumbtack is cool.

Make an exclusive guest list

Alcohol. 'Nough said.

You don't need to convince every on earth that the product is cool, just the people everyone on earth look up to.

### Chapter 7: Pitching new business

If any idea takes longer than 15 seconds to explain, kill it.

An easy way to create a manifesto is have an intriguing thought in the beginning, a line at the end that could be a tagline, and fill in the rest of it with language that flows from your insight to the line at the end.

A good test of your idea is to think if it would still be clever if you were presenting it in a noisy food court and you had to stop for a minute halfway through presenting it.

### Chapter 8: The delicate art of presenting

Solve your client's underlying problem, and there's no stopping what you're allowed to get away with. Sometimes, it's as simple as them not wanting to get yelled at by their boss. If that's the case, offer them extra help in impressing them with case studies, facts, data, etc.

Clients don't care about your awards or training. They want you to tell them an insight that they didn't know in a way that they can believe.

Let your client into the thinking. They often don't realize you spent 2 hour deciding which font to use.

If an idea is dead, move on. Don't let a client talk an idea to death over and over again. It wastes time. Take notes on what they don't like and move on.

Pick someone before the meeting to own the idea.  Everyone else shouldn't talk or explain it unless they are directly asked a question.

Don't use the world "cool" to present an idea. Use the word "smart".

### Chapter 9: Words of Advice

Making memorable work is not the agency's job. It's yours.

Don't wait for someone else to decide it's time for your career to start.

One assignment grows into the next, and into the next. Weasel in anyway you can.

### Chapter 10: Inspiration on being a creative

You're probably not the best. Put your ego aside and learn from other's.

Press is a better measure of success than awards.

### Chapter 11: How to deal and avoid politics

Let your clients kill your work and lean on your boss.

As a starting creative, your job is to prove your Creative Director right

Few will take risks, everyone will take credit.

No matter who says it, if it's a good idea, run with it.


Junior: Writing Your Way Ahead in Advertising

Note taking is the best form of studying I've ever come across. It forces you to [think critically about the ideas](https://twitter.com/mollyfmielke/status/1496212938788642824?s=20&t=Ta8qrVFPaf9aa2nRVDBnXg) you're consuming and what's going on in the world. Most of the time, [we don't give ourselves enough slack](https://fs.blog/slack/) in life to sit with our thoughts. But note taking forces you to do that.

I've tried about every note taking app on the market by now and none of them are everything I want them to be. Notion is great and is what I would recommend to someone looking to take more notes and get organized in life. I've tried Roam, mem.io, Evernote, and many, many more. But the constant switching of systems defeats the main purposes of note taking, rediscovering ideas you wrote about before. If you start from scratch every six months, you won't have many insights to rediscover.

Our of all the apps I've tried, Obsidian is the one I like the most. The customization is nice and the ability to publish via Obsidian Publish is what drew me to it.

## Working with the garage door up

The biggest inspiration for me to publish my notes is from Andy Matuschak. He has his notes public and a lot of people know "Andy's Notes." I was exploring them one day and was awe-struck by the ideas he was writing about. Andy writes about this concept called ["Working with the garage door up"](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Work_with_the_garage_door_up) and is one of the reasons he publishes his notes.

When I was younger, every weekend I'd do projects in the garage with my dad. Since we kept the garage door open, we never knew who was going to walk by. Sometimes, it was the Soto's. Next door neighbor's of ours who always supported my school fundraisers.

Other times it was friends asking if I could come out to play. On rare occasions, it was someone who could help us with the project we're working on! This is what happens when you work with the garage door up. You run into people and make connections you wouldn't have otherwise.

## Increasing online serendipity

[David Perell](https://perell.com/), a writer and creator of [Write of Passage](https://writeofpassage.school/), encourages his students to [maximize their serendipity by writing online](https://perell.com/essay/serendipity/). He writes:

> Maintain a [website](http://perell.com/join) so people can find your bio, share your work, and describe you in a favorable light. Once your website is live, publish content to encourage people to visit your website, advertise your skills and hype you up.

But creating polished content on a regular basis is difficult, especially if you're balancing a job, a family, and other hobbies. So, a great way to increase serendipitous interactions is to publish things that are not polished.

Andy, in his note about [working with the garage door up](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Work_with_the_garage_door_up), writes this:

> This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it's [Screenshot Saturday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/screenshotsaturday?lang=en); it's giving a lecture about the problems you're pondering in the shower; it's thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn't work at all. It's so much of Twitch. I want to see the process. I want to see you trim the artichoke. I want to see you choose the color palette.

Taking notes encourages you to think about how you're trimming the artichoke. Publishing those notes shows others how you're thinking about trimming the artichoke. Someone who also thinks a lot about trimming artichoke's can now connect with you to refine their own process. It's a win-win!

## Why I went with Obsidian

There are no right ways to publish your notes online. You could write things in a Google Doc and share that in your Twitter bio if you want to. That's he best way to capture notes though, which is why I chose Obsidian.

The process of taking new notes is the most important thing to focus on. I had to make sure I enjoyed the process of taking notes in whatever system I used. I like how Obsidian is a desktop app and not online. This for ease of use and not a privacy thing. I found if I was using a Chrome tab, it would get closed out or I'd lose it.

I also like the free flowing structure of Obsidian and how anything can go anywhere, though I do see how this could be confusing and disorganized. If you want more structure, [Tiago Forte's PARA](https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/) method is recommend, or you can use the [Map of Content](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GqQKCT0PZ4) idea.

What sealed the deal for me was the [Obsidian Publish](https://obsidian.md/publish) feature. With only a few clicks, I could make my notes public at a custom domain and allow users to search and interact with my notes in similar functionality to how Andy's Notes work. If there are pages I don't want to publish, I can add some YAML to the top of the page which tells Obsidian, "Hey, don't make this public. K, thanks!"

I'm happy with how my notes are coming along both online and offline. I also enjoy how I can share links with people online to ideas I'm thinking about, but haven't thought about it enough to write a full essay. You can check out [my public notes here](https://notes.daltonmabery.com/About+these+notes).


Why I Publish My Notes Online

Thinking of ideas and paragraphs while walking or lying down is "writing", it's just doing the mental part of writing. Your fingers aren't physically tapping keys, but that doesn't mean you aren't writing.

When someone imagines a "writer", they picture them sitting in an old cottage with a rickety brown desk filled with crumpled up papers, whiskey, and cigarette ash. While this sounds like a picture perfect scene (minus the cigarettes), that's only part of what the writing process looks like.

Most writing occurs in a writer's head. This is where they put different ideas together in various ways, think of illustrations and stories to use, and substitute words for one another. They arrange the sentences and paragraphs in their mind as well.

What's interesting about this process is that it's usually not intentional. Someone doesn't go out to the grocery store thinking, "I'm going to finish writing this article while I'm out." Instead, they hear something on the radio, or see an interesting billboard and think about how it might be useful for whatever it is they're writing about.

If you're struggling to write, get away from your desk and out in the world. Most writing happens in your head.