Stuff  I’ve written about writing:

• Minimum Viable Content
• Copywriting
• Content Anxiety
• “Do you have any writing advice?”

Word vomits I’ve written about writing:

• 0115 – how to write for a living
• 0116 – writer’s “block”
• 0118 – What I’ve learnt from writing over 120,000+ words.
• 0148 – becoming a better writer
• 0152 – Letter To A Young Songwriter
• 0155 – write to solve your own problems
• 0181 – Writing Wet And Dry
• 0217 – frustration and writing
• 0232 – use stories as a thinking tool
• 0244 – reminder that writing is therapy
• 0314 – writing when tired, little rubbish piles
• 0347 – writing games
  • writing production line – supply chain from raw material to finished published output
• 0367 – history of my writing journey
• 0388 – I will write
• 0399 – good conversations do not write novels
• 0409 – emotion in writing
• 0422 – reconfiguring things to become a better writer
• 0474 – “Do you have any writing advice?”
• 0503 – troubleshooting my first story
  • 0505 – troubleshooting stories, pt 2
• 0508 – writing publicly again
• 0517 – writing for a richer experience of reality
• 0521 – next steps for writing and work
• 0533 – the next steps of my writing journey
• 0543 – writing as joyful self-correspondence
  • When I spend time not writing I get really miserable
• 0546 – the future of my words

Stuff elsewhere about writing:

So you want to be a writer? Essential tips for aspiring novelists, by Colum McCann for Guardian

Farnam Street – Anne Lamott: Some Instructions on Writing and Life 

Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 23 Authors

Collectanea – on writing

How Stephen King Teaches Writing –

Writing advice from Chuck Pahlaniuk (no verbs; show don’t tell)

Paris Review – Faulkner, on Art and Writing (interview)

Slightly More Than 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism – http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/05/slightly-more-than-100-fantastic-pieces-of-journalism/284564/

Venkat’s How To Become A Thoughtful Writer – http://web-info.blogspot.sg/2013/04/how-to-become-thoughtful-writer.html

Tom Chiarella – http://tetw.org/Tom_Chiarella

Tom Junod – http://tetw.org/Tom_Junod

150 Great Articles and Essays – http://tetw.org/Greats

Interview with Murakami about writing

How to write an about me section, by Nicole Fenton for 99u

Taleb’s reviews of books on Amazon

http://submittedforyourperusal.com/ 

“I took a seminar with an acting teacher named Judith Weston. I learned a key insight to character. She believed that all well-drawn characters have a spine, and the idea is that the character has an inner motor, a dominant, unconscious goal that they’re striving for, an itch that they can’t scratch. I took to this like a duck to water.” – ANDREW STANTON [from his Feb 2012 TED Talk] writer-director, WALL-E, FINDING NEMO, A BUG’S LIFE; writer, TOY STORY, TOY STORY 2, TOY STORY 3

“Never send off any piece of writing the moment it is finished. Put it aside. Take on something else. Go back to it a month later and re-read it. Examine each sentence and ask ‘Does this say precisely what I mean? Is it capable of misunderstanding? Have I used a cliché where I could have invented a new and therefore asserting and memorable form? Have I repeated myself and wobbled round the point when I could have fixed the whole thing in six rightly chosen words? Am I using words in their basic meaning or in a loose plebeian way?’”  —Evelyn Waugh

• Stanton on storytelling
• Emma Coats
• Carl Zimmer
• Bradbury
• Venkat

 

• Thinking VS. Writing, by Venkatesh Rao. Great perspective, great read:
• http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/02/instructions-on-writing-and-life/ recommended by venkat
• The Paris Review – Faulkner, on art/writing
• I’ve got Alexandra Franzen in my bookmarks. I like her style.
• Here’s somebody’s aggregated writing wisdom.
• – The Middle Finger Project is a guilty pleasure for me. Ash Ambirge has balls. 
• http://www.coxontool.com/index.php/Collectanea/Writing: “writing something that other people will read forces you to think well.”
• Writers On Writing: I’ve been meaning to read this (haven’t yet)
• David Foster Wallace (AggregatedbyBrainpickings, which is awesome)
  • http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/tag/david-foster-wallace/ also see his Goodreads quotes, and I’ve been meaning to read his essay on lobsters
• writing advice from Pahlaniuk http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1jltqn/writers_of_reddit_what_are_exceptionally_simple/cbfyn4u
• The Art Of Fiction, interview with a writer http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6117/the-art-of-fiction-no-215-jeffrey-eugenides
• http://37signals.com/svn/writing

Do you want to write video games?

• ‘Reading Like a Writer,’ by Francine Prose – New York Times
• How to Read Like a Writer | Brain Pickings
• Do You Read Differently Online and in Print?
• Annie Dillard’s Impossible Pages – The New York Times
• Close Reading – The Atlantic

Lessons:

• “It’s strange what lingers in the mind, little random facts. What cigarettes somebody smoked. An old LiveJournal comment or Friendster testimonial. All these seemingly random snapshots of a life.”
• I’m too kind to my characters before I even begin to write them– they know too much, and they’re just generally too good at everything. So my stories don’t take off. There needs to be more conflict. I suppose I should list out all the conflicts I’ve experienced in my life, and imagine different ways that they could have played out, imagine different, adjacent realities. That would be cool. I should create a to-do item for that.

How to decide what to write next

I have a whole bunch of things that I want to write. I figure that before I start writing, it would make sense for me to come up with a simple heuristic for deciding whether or not I should actually write something. That way, I skip the things that aren’t worth writing, and I focus on the things that are.

• Am I writing this because it’ll help somebody? +1
• Am I writing this because it’ll help me? +2
• Am I writing this to make fun of somebody? -5
• Has somebody else written about this better than I can? -3