Working Through the Fear of Being Seen

On Writing #3

Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective.

The revolt of the reader | The Observation Deck

Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life. And because reading is important to me, writing is too: writing not only allows us to convey our ideas, but the very act forces us to test and distill them — at once making our ideas more robust while providing the vehicle by which to share them.

Writing is Thinking: Learning to Write with Confidence

Learning to write is learning to think, because writing is thinking. They are two peas in a powerful pod. This article goes over my writing process, focused on minimizing the activation energy to get started.

The Ultimate Guide to Writing

Think better. Grow your audience. Accelerate your career.

Toward a durable writing stack – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

I have benefited over the years from others who have documented their writing setups, and so I feel some obligation to pay the favor forward by doing so with my own. The stack I’ll describe here is one I’ve been iterating on for about twenty years, starting from when I began discovering the pleasures of plain-text writing. Every aspect of it has changed over that period, but the some basic goals and flows have been with me through the writing of my college thesis, five books, and hundreds of articles. I am quite happy with where I am, and others might benefit from what I’ve come up with.

Robert Hanks · On Putting Things Off

Job gone, I sat around trying to write, managing bits and pieces, but earning very little. And then my marriage drifted away too, leaving me, in Alan Partridge’s phrase, clinically fed-up boo-hoo. My wife, having said she would leave, took two and a half years to find a way of doing it – there is a small consolation in not being the only procrastinator in the relationship. While this was going on the LRB commissioned me to write about Richard Hughes, who wrote A High Wind in Jamaica. I like Hughes and it seemed like a job I could get on with. I cheerfully settled to the research, reading the novels I hadn’t read, rereading the ones I had. Then I started writing, or that’s what I told myself: some paragraphs, some sentences, a sketch of a plan, then some rewriting, rearranging, scrubbing, more rewriting, more scrubbing, pauses to reconsider. Then I did some more research: the short stories, the children’s stories, the poems and plays, the journalism, Richard Perceval Graves’s biography, then back to the rewriting …

afterword

Writing this handbook has been a process of not over-thinking it. In deciding to do it post-by-post, day-by-day, I practiced sharing as I went, posting to a ...

Paranoia: A Beginner's Guide — LessWrong

People sometimes make mistakes. (Citation Needed) …

Dangerous Writing App

Dangerous Writing App. If you stop typing, all progress will be lost. Now with over 500+ writing prompts to choose from.

Publishing your work increases your luck

In 12 months, @aarondfrancis changed his life by bypassing fear and embracing risk. Now, he’s working his dream job @tuple. Get his full story on The ReadME Project:

Paragraph

Where writers share, grow, and get paid — one post at a time.