Category: On Writing

The discipline, the decisions, and the reality of writing as a practice — what the craft demands and what it quietly teaches.

The Writer Who Rewrites

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Rewriting in writing is different from revision, and the difference matters. Revision works on what exists — it improves, clarifies, tightens, cuts. Rewriting starts again — it produces a new version of the piece from a different angle, with a different structure, or from a place in the argument that the first draft had not yet reached. A writer who revises is improving a draft. A writer who rewrites is writing the piece again, having learned from the first attempt what the piece actually needs to be.

The distinction matters because the decision of when to revise and when to rewrite is one of the more consequential decisions in the writing process. A draft that is revised when it should be rewritten tends to produce a piece that is better in its parts and still wrong in its whole — technically improved but fundamentally unchanged from a version that was not working. A draft that is rewritten when revision would have been sufficient wastes time and risks losing what the first draft had found.

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Writing and Repetition

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Writing and repetition are usually discussed as a problem. The repeated word, the idea that comes around again, the subject that has been covered before — these are treated as failures of variety, signs that the writer has run out of things to say or has not noticed that they have said them already. This understanding of repetition as failure is not wrong in every case, but it is incomplete. Repetition in writing is also a feature of a developed practice, and understanding the difference between the two kinds is more useful than treating all repetition as something to be avoided.

The distinction that matters is between repetition that is accidental and repetition that is deliberate — between saying the same thing again because the writer did not notice they had said it, and returning to the same territory because it has not yet been fully understood.

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The Writer Who Compares

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Comparing your writing to others is one of the most common experiences in a writing life and one of the least examined. The comparison happens in many forms: the essay that makes a writer feel their own work is thin, the writer whose voice makes a writer feel they have no voice, the body of work that makes a writer feel their own accumulation is slow and small. The experience is so common that it has become a cliché — writers comparing themselves to other writers is treated as a known hazard, something to be aware of and manage.

What is less often examined is what the comparison is actually doing. Not its emotional effect, which is usually obvious, but its cognitive content — what the comparison is telling the writer, whether that information is accurate, and whether acting on it would improve or damage the work.

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Writing and Attention

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Concentration and attention get used interchangeably in most writing advice, and the confusion costs something. Concentration is the ability to stay on a task despite distraction — it’s a muscle, and it fatigues the way muscles do. Attention, in the sense that matters for writing, is different: it’s the quality of contact between a writer and the sentence in front of them. A writer can concentrate for four hours and produce nothing worth keeping. A writer can attend to a single paragraph for twenty minutes and get somewhere true. Writing and attention are related, but treating them as synonyms is where a lot of productivity advice goes wrong.

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The Writer Who Finishes Too Quickly

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Finishing writing too quickly is a less discussed problem than not finishing at all, but it is a real one. The writer who cannot finish — who circles the piece indefinitely, who holds the draft in permanent revision, who never presses publish — receives a lot of attention in writing advice. The writer who finishes too quickly receives very little, perhaps because finishing looks like productivity and the problems it produces are less visible than the problem of the unfinished piece.

But finishing too quickly has its own costs, and they show up in the work. The piece that was published before it was ready, the argument that needed one more pass to become fully coherent, the essay that arrived at its ending before the thinking had been completed — these are the products of finishing too quickly, and they are recognisable to readers even when they cannot name exactly what is wrong.

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What It Means to Have a Position

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Having a position in writing means committing to a claim that can be disagreed with. This sounds straightforward, but in practice it is one of the things writers most consistently avoid. The pull towards balance, towards acknowledging all perspectives, towards presenting multiple views without taking one — this pull is powerful and, in certain writing contexts, appropriate. In essay writing, in personal writing, in any form of writing that is meant to say something rather than simply to survey what has been said, it is a form of evasion.

A writer without having a position in writing is one who has not yet decided what they think. The writing that results is not balanced — it is incomplete. Balance implies that equal weight has been given to competing views by a writer who has considered them. What most position-less writing actually offers is the impression of balance produced by the avoidance of commitment.

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Writing and Doubt

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Writing and doubt are constant companions, and the relationship between them is more complicated than the standard account suggests. The standard account treats doubt as an obstacle — something to be overcome, managed, or pushed through in order to produce work. The writer who waits for doubt to pass is a writer who does not write. This is true as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough, because doubt is not only an obstacle. It is also, in the right conditions, a signal.

The question is not how to eliminate doubt from the writing process — it cannot be eliminated — but how to distinguish the doubt that is telling you something useful from the doubt that is simply the discomfort of doing difficult work.

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The Difference Between a Subject and an Argument

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Subject and argument in writing are often treated as the same thing — but the difference between them is one of the most important distinctions a writer can make, and one of the least discussed. A subject is what a piece is about. An argument is what a piece says about what it is about. The two are not the same, and a piece that has a subject but no argument is not yet a piece of writing — it is a topic waiting to become one.

This matters practically because many writers treat the identification of a subject as the identification of a piece. They have something they want to write about — revision, memory, the internet, solitude — and they begin writing towards it, assuming that the piece will find its argument in the process. Sometimes it does. More often, the piece that begins without an argument produces a draft that covers the subject without saying anything about it — competent, sometimes interesting, but ultimately without the point that would make it worth reading.

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Writing and Solitude

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Writing and solitude are connected in ways that are easy to state and harder to live with. The connection is not simply practical — that writing requires uninterrupted time, which is more available alone than in company. It is something closer to structural: writing requires a particular relationship with one’s own thinking that company, however welcome, tends to interrupt.

This is worth examining because the relationship between writing and solitude is often discussed only at the level of logistics — finding time, finding a quiet room, protecting a writing schedule from interruption. These are real concerns, but they are not the whole of what solitude does for writing. The deeper connection is about what solitude makes possible in the mind, not just in the schedule.

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What Makes a Piece of Writing Stay With You

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What makes writing memorable is not always what makes it good. A piece can be well-constructed, accurately argued, and carefully written without leaving any trace in the reader’s mind after the reading is done. And a piece can be flawed in identifiable ways — overlong, imperfectly structured, occasionally overwritten — and still stay with the reader for years. The qualities that produce staying power are not identical to the qualities that produce quality, though they often overlap.

This is worth examining because writers tend to optimise for quality — for accuracy, clarity, and craft — without thinking explicitly about what makes a piece linger. And the piece that lingers is, in a practical sense, the piece that has done the most work. It has changed something in the reader’s thinking that persists beyond the reading.

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