Write Better

Sometimes I let myself feel the pain a little bit, as a treat

Reading is fuel. Reading to avoid your own blank page is... Just procrastination.

Judging your first draft with an editor's eye is profoundly unfair to your creative process. You have permission to be terrible!

The writer's job is to put words on the page regardless of quality. The editor's job is to return and deal with the evidence.

Separate the tasks physically, if you can: draft on the sofa, edit at the desk.

Drafting is throwing clay. Editing is carving. These require different minds, different moods, and - ideally - different furniture.

Editing while you draft is driving with the handbrake on. Turn off the inner critic until the book is done!

The writer and the editor are different people. Never invite both into the room at the same time.

Forgive yourself for missing the occasional target.

A massive word count is meaningless if it's filler.

@MerriamWebster Omg Merriam-Webster replied to me 🥹🥹🥹

@WriteThatBetter merriam-webster.com/grammar/common…

What word is your spelling nemesis? This is a safe space.

@trink24 @MerriamWebster … Oh

@WriteThatBetter @MerriamWebster I always say this in my head when I am typing it: De-finite-ly

Make the target so small you can't procrastinate it. Commit to just a hundred words! Once you start, you'll usually write more.

Don't measure your worth by your daily output. Some days you write a thousand words. Some days you fix one sentence. Both are, equally, part of the job.

Five hundred words a day, sustained, finishes a novel in six months. Slow and steady produces the manuscript.

Aiming for five thousand words a day guarantees burnout by Thursday.

If obsessive accuracy is slowing the narrative down, just invent the street. Who's going to check?

A mapping app and a few good documentaries will get you ninety percent of the sensory detail you actually need.

Do just enough research to make the world feel inhabited. Then stop, for the love of God.

Your reader cares about the character's grief, not your architecturally precise description of a fourteenth-century flying buttress.