For years I’ve saved writing advice I like in a note called “Writing Inspiration.” Here are my favorites, plus some of my highlights from books about writing and a few things I’ve said about writing on Twitter.
Take your writing seriously
Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well
That’s one of my foremost pieces of life advice for anyone, actually, to take yourself seriously in a culture full of people trying to build self-defensive shields by trivializing their own lives: take yourself seriously, because no one else is going to do it for you.
— Freddie deBoer, “If Only Simple Were Simple”
Why do they think they need permission to write about the experiences and feelings they know best—their own?
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well
I told myself that I could not be so afraid of judgment that I would hold back.
— Min Jin Lee, “On Selling Your First Novel After 11 Years”
It’s hard. Stay with it.
The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.
— Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car
Is there some shortcut? Not one I’ve found. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.
— Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car
The best advice I ever got was to “choose the important over the urgent.”
— Min Jin Lee, to PBS NewsHour
Often, I’ve wished that I could’ve had quicker success, greater financial security, more respect, et cetera, as a writer. For nearly twelve years now since leaving the law, I have often felt ashamed for wanting to be a writer and doubtful of my talents. What helped in these moments was to consider what was important, rather than the urgent feelings of embarrassment and helplessness. What was important is still important now: to learn to write better in order to better complete the vision one holds in one’s head and to enjoy the writing, because the work has to be the best part.
— Min Jin Lee, in the essay at the end of Free Food for Millionaires
Min Jin Lee spent eleven years learning to write fiction before she sold her first novel. Her essay on those years is worth reading in full.
Writing is how you find out what you think
A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. … There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.
— Paul Graham, “The Need to Read”
For me, the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.
— Robert Frost
Write first, converse second. If my thoughts are a messy tangle of strings, writing gets out as many knots as possible so that I come to conversation focused only on working through the final few tangles.
— Isabel, “Why I Write”
Rewriting is the real writing
Since one measure of rewriting progress is words eliminated, I often joke that I write for free but charge for eliminating words. But rewriting is the only kind of writing that counts. If you aren’t rewriting, you aren’t developing as a writer.
— Venkatesh Rao, on Quora
Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting…
— Ted Chiang, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”
I don’t ever want to be the person who speaks or thinks in first-draft mind.
— George Saunders, on The Ezra Klein Show
Could I simplify this? Could I make it more like speech?
— George Orwell, All Art Is Propaganda
Everyone’s process is different
I can’t start writing a book until I’ve thought it through and can see it whole in my mind. So before I start writing, I boil the book down to three paragraphs, or two, or one—that’s when it comes into view.
— Robert Caro, Working
My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.
— Ernest Hemingway, as quoted by Cal Newport
And so I am the enemy of the formula.
— Ted Gioia, on the How I Write podcast
And Jerry Seinfeld on how he writes a joke.
Spend it all now
One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. … The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Write for yourself
You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well
Make the ordinary extraordinary. … It’s your job to make an audience as excited and fascinated about something as you are, and real life does that.
— Ricky Gervais, on writing comedy
Why write at all
That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
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.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
— Kurt Vonnegut, in a letter to high school students
But primarily Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese.
— Charles Bukowski, On Writing
A few of my own
Some things I’ve said about writing on Twitter:
You can probably learn more about yourself doing 10 newsletter posts or 10 YouTube videos than 5 years in a job.
Writing a book is easy if you like writing. What’s hard is deprioritizing everything else.
There are not enough books, newsletters, blogs, or podcasts in the world. … Here is your permission slip to get started. Create something that matters to you.
So many modern books lack soul or insight. … Just tell us how you actually feel, Author!
Writing is absolutely wild - you sit down and stuff appears through your fingers on a screen - sometimes it’s really magical because I haven’t thought of the ideas before sitting down to write.
Write a book sooner than you think you are ready.
While I don’t write every week or every day, I embrace the mantra, ‘write most days’ - this generally happens because I enjoy it so much.
Write to let the others find you.
I’ve also written about who I write for and how to write in public.