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

  1. To write well, you must first write poorly.
  2. Complex is crude. Simple is sophisticated.
  3. Progress comes rarely from the addition of good ideas, and frequently from the removal of bad ones.
  4. “Better” is your only goalpost, and you’ll never hit it.
  5. You may have written it, but it belongs to the reader.
  6. To develop your voice, exercise your ear.
  7. Don’t cling to your opinions – nobody cares. (But never them go – they’re all you have).
  8. Hope leads inevitably to despair.
  9. If it ain’t true, it had better be honest.
  10. The masters are nothing more than absurdly good at the basics.
writing

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