The Paradoxes of Writing
At some point I added writing.fm to the feeds I follow on NetNewsWire. A peculiarity of said site is that you won't find any information about the author anywhere in the blog. I must have know who the author was when I added the feed, but I don't remember it now.
Anyway, in the article titled The Paradoxes of Writing, the author shares some advice about the craft of writing. I copied them below:
The Paradoxes of Writing
- To write well, you must first write poorly.
- Complex is crude. Simple is sophisticated.
- Progress comes rarely from the addition of good ideas, and frequently from the removal of bad ones.
- “Better” is your only goalpost, and you’ll never hit it.
- You may have written it, but it belongs to the reader.
- To develop your voice, exercise your ear.
- Don’t cling to your opinions – nobody cares. (But never them go – they’re all you have).
- Hope leads inevitably to despair.
- If it ain’t true, it had better be honest.
- The masters are nothing more than absurdly good at the basics.