Category: Writing Systems

Practical frameworks and processes for writers who want to work with more clarity, consistency, and less resistance.

How I Read When I’m Working on Something

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There is a version of reading that belongs entirely to leisure, and then there is the version that happens when you are mid-project. These are not the same activity, and confusing them is a reliable way to feel busy without actually getting anywhere. How I read when writing has changed considerably over the years, mostly because I stopped pretending the two modes were interchangeable. Now I make the distinction early, before I open the book, before I reach the essay. I ask myself: what am I here for?

The answer changes how I move through a page.

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How I Use Constraints to Start a Piece

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Using constraints to start writing is one of the most reliable moves I know — because the blank page is not actually the problem. The problem is the absence of constraints — the sense that anything is possible, which in practice means that nothing in particular is required, and so nothing gets started. Using constraints to start a piece is one of the most reliable ways I have found to move from not writing to writing, without waiting for the conditions to feel right.

A constraint is any deliberate limitation placed on the writing before it begins. A word limit. A time limit. A fixed form. A required opening. A restricted subject. The constraint does not improve the writing directly — it changes the writer’s relationship to the task. Instead of facing an open field in which every direction is equally available and equally daunting, the writer faces a defined space with edges. The edges make starting possible.

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How I Handle a Piece That Has Gone Cold

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A piece that has gone cold is different from a piece that was abandoned. An abandoned piece was given up on — the writer decided, consciously or by default, that the piece was not worth finishing. A piece that has gone cold was set aside with the intention of returning, but has not been returned to, and has accumulated the particular difficulty that comes with distance from work that was once alive and is no longer.

Every writer who works across multiple pieces has pieces that have gone cold. The draft that was started and interrupted by other work. The piece that was nearly finished but stalled at the last section. The essay that had a strong argument but lost its energy somewhere in the middle and was set aside to be fixed later. Later did not come, and now the piece sits in the drafts folder, neither abandoned nor in progress, getting colder.

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How I Decide What to Write Next

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Deciding what to write next is a question that most writing advice treats as solved by planning — by the editorial calendar, the content strategy, the topic bank. These are useful tools, and I use versions of them. But the decision of what to write next is not fully solved by planning, because plans are made in advance of the thinking that the writing itself produces, and the thinking tends to reveal subjects and angles that the plan did not anticipate.

The most interesting pieces I have written were not planned; they emerged from something I read, something I noticed, something a previous piece revealed that I had not been looking for. Planning produces consistency; it does not always produce the most alive writing. The question of how to decide what to write next is partly a question of how to plan well enough to maintain consistency, and partly a question of how to stay open to what the planning does not and cannot anticipate.

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What I Do Between Drafts

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The time between drafts is not empty time. It is, in many cases, the most productive part of the writing process — but it is productive in ways that do not look like productivity, which is why it is often misunderstood and undervalued. A writer who has finished a draft and set it aside is not resting from writing. They are doing a different kind of work, and understanding what that work is makes it possible to do it more deliberately.

Between drafts, the thinking that the draft has started continues without the draft present. The argument that was only partially formed in the writing develops in the background. The problem that was visible but not yet solvable in the draft becomes, in the days away from it, a problem with a shape that revision can address. The piece is absent; the thinking about the piece is not.

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How I Work With an Editor

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Working with an editor is one of the most practically important relationships in a writing life, and one of the least discussed in terms of how it actually works. The discussion that does exist tends to focus on the writer’s experience of being edited — on how to receive feedback without defensiveness, on how to manage the emotional difficulty of having your work changed by someone else. This is real and worth discussing, but it starts from the wrong place. The writer who understands editing only as something done to them is in a passive position relative to a relationship that works best when both parties are active.

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Writing the Difficult Piece

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Every writer has pieces that are genuinely difficult to write — not difficult in the sense of requiring research or technical knowledge, but difficult in the sense of resisting being written. The argument that will not cohere. The subject that feels too large or too close. The piece that has been started and abandoned several times without arriving anywhere. Writing a difficult piece is a situation that calls for a different approach from ordinary writing, because the methods that work for pieces that are not difficult tend to make difficult pieces harder.

The difficulty is usually not random. A piece that resists being written is almost always resisting for a reason, and identifying the reason is the first step towards addressing it. Not all difficult pieces have the same problem, and the same approach will not work for all of them.

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How I Plan a Series of Posts

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Planning a series of posts is a different activity from planning individual posts, and treating it as simply more of the same tends to produce a different kind of failure. A site that publishes individual posts without thinking about how they relate to each other tends to produce a body of work that is competent post by post and incoherent as a whole — a collection of pieces that cover similar territory from similar angles without building anything cumulatively.

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Writing to a Deadline

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Writing to a deadline is the normal condition of most professional writing, and yet it receives surprisingly little attention as a distinct skill. The assumption tends to be that good writing is good writing, and that a deadline simply determines when it must be finished. This assumption is partly right and partly wrong. A deadline does not change what good writing is, but it does change how it is produced — and the writer who does not adapt their process to deadline conditions tends to produce work that is either late or worse than it would have been with more time.

Understanding how deadline pressure affects the writing process — and how to work with that pressure rather than against it — is a practical skill that develops with experience and can be developed more quickly with deliberate attention.

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What I Do When I Disagree With a Brief

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Disagreeing with a brief is a situation that most working writers encounter and few discuss openly. The brief arrives — from a client, an editor, or a commissioning manager — and something in it is wrong. Not wrong in the sense of factually incorrect, but wrong in the sense that following it as written would produce a piece that does not serve the purpose it was commissioned to serve, or that asks the writer to say something they do not believe, or that constrains the piece in ways that will damage rather than shape it.

What to do in this situation is a practical and an ethical question simultaneously, and the two aspects cannot be separated. The practical question is how to navigate the disagreement without losing the commission or the relationship. The ethical question is what the writer owes to their own judgment when that judgment conflicts with the client’s instructions.

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