"Strive for fresh words and images. Leave “myriad” and [its] ilk to the poets. Leave “ilk” to anyone who will take it away."
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well (Writing About Places: The Travel Article)
hypercritic
The trouble with the draft-edit-publish strategy is that in practice it often goes something like this:
- Write a whole bunch of words. Just vomit them right out.
- Get distracted.
- Repeat steps 1 and 2 an arbitrary number of times between zero and a lot.
- Resist the urge to consider the piece finished.
- Wait a while. Step away from the computer. Maybe sleep.
- Decide to do the editing thing.
- Internal monologue: “What the hell is wrong with you? Delete everything. It’s all terrible. Why did you even think you should write this?”
- Delete everything.
Occasionally I salvage something I like instead of deleting everything or inflicting yet another baroque, stream-of-consciousness word salad on the world at large. 1
Occasionally.
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The latter is a problem largely because of the way it makes me cringe in embarrassment and refuse to read anything I’ve ever written.) ↩
Top 1 Habits of Amazing Writers
- They write.
I’m working on cultivating that habit, but it’s still pretty much impossible to have too many reminders about it.
I like my writing best when I’m not quite sure what I’m saying or whether I agree with it. That’s the point at which your writing gets better, when you go out on that edge.
