Tag: writing practice

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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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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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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Writing and Memory

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Writing and memory are entangled in ways that are not always obvious. The most visible entanglement is the one where memory supplies the material — the writer drawing on what they have lived, observed, and retained to produce work that is grounded in experience rather than abstraction. This is real, and it matters. But it is not the most interesting thing that happens between writing and memory.

The more interesting thing is what writing does to memory. A writer who commits an experience to the page does not simply record it. They shape it — selecting what to include, deciding what order events occurred in, choosing which detail carries the meaning. And in shaping it, they change it. The written version of an experience gradually displaces the unwritten one, until the memory of the experience and the memory of the piece become difficult to distinguish.

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The Writer Who Stops

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When a writer stops writing, the stopping is rarely announced. There is no decision, no moment of closure. The writing simply becomes less frequent, then occasional, then absent — and the writer who has not written for three months looks back and cannot identify the point at which they stopped. It happened gradually, and then it was a fact.

This is different from writer’s block, which is usually discussed as an inability to write — the blank page that resists, the sentence that will not come. The writer who stops is not blocked in that sense. They could write. The capacity is there. But the writing does not happen, and the reasons it does not happen are worth examining, because they are not always what they appear to be.

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What It Means to Write Slowly

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Writing slowly is not the same as writing less. It is not a productivity position — a rejection of output targets or word count goals. It is a description of a particular relationship between the writer and the work: one in which the writing is given the time it actually needs, rather than the time available before the next deadline.

This distinction matters because the pressure to write quickly is not only external. Writers internalise it. The habit of producing at speed — of moving from brief to draft to published without the pauses that thinking requires — becomes a way of working that eventually becomes a way of writing. The fast writer produces fast writing: prose that is competent and complete but has not been given time to become what it might have been.

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The Problem with Writing Advice

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Writing advice is everywhere, and most of it is correct. Write every day. Read widely. Cut what you don’t need. Know your audience. Show don’t tell. Find your voice. These are not wrong. Applied at the right moment, by the right writer, to the right piece, most standard writing advice will improve the work.

The problem with writing advice is not that it is incorrect. It is that it is decontextualised — offered as universal principle when it is almost always specific to a particular kind of writing, a particular stage of development, or a particular problem the advice-giver happened to have. Advice that solved one writer’s problem becomes a rule. The rule gets repeated until it feels like truth. And the writer who follows it faithfully, in a context where it does not apply, produces work that is worse for having followed it.

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