Tag: writing practice

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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The Writer Who Reads

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Reading and writing are discussed as related activities, which they are, but the nature of the relationship is less often examined. The standard advice, read widely, read in your genre, read the writers you admire, is correct as far as it goes. It does not go very far. What reading actually does to a writer, and how it does it, is a more interesting question than the advice suggests.

The most direct effect of reading is the least interesting: vocabulary, exposure to sentence structures, familiarity with how different kinds of prose move. These accumulate passively. A writer who reads enough will absorb a working knowledge of how language can be arranged without consciously studying it. This is real and useful, but it is also the minimum. It is what reading does for any attentive person, writer or not.

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What It Means to Write in Public

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Writing in public is not the same as publishing. Publishing is a technical act — a piece moves from private to visible, from draft to live. Writing in public is something more considered than that. It is the decision to think on the page in a way that others can see, and to stand behind that thinking as your own.

The distinction matters because it changes what writing is for. A piece written purely for publication — shaped around what will perform, what will be shared, what will attract the right kind of attention — is oriented towards reception. A piece written in public is oriented towards truth. Not absolute truth, but the writer’s honest attempt to say what they actually think, knowing that the attempt is visible and will be judged.

These two orientations produce different kinds of writing. And increasingly, the first has come to dominate.

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What I Do Before I Write a Word

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Before you write a word, there is a set of decisions that will determine whether the writing goes well or poorly. Not the writing itself — the thinking that precedes it. Most writers skip this stage, or compress it into a few minutes of vague intention, and then wonder why the draft stalls, repeats itself, or arrives somewhere other than where it was supposed to go.

This framework applies to purposeful writing — pieces with a defined brief, audience, and destination. Exploratory writing is a different practice, and a different conversation.

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The Myth of Inspiration — On Waiting to Write

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The myth of inspiration is one most writers accept without question. Ask someone why they haven’t written the thing they want to write, and the answer comes quickly: they haven’t been inspired yet.

They’re waiting. For the right moment, the right mood, the right convergence of energy and idea that will carry them through a blank page and out the other side with something worth keeping. They believe this convergence will arrive eventually, and that when it does, the writing will come easily — fluently, almost effortlessly, the way it looks from the outside when a writer describes their process in an interview.

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What I Don’t Do When I Write for the Internet

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Most advice about writing for the internet focuses on what to add: more keywords, more structure, more optimisation, more output.

Over time, I’ve found the opposite to be more useful.

This post is not about technique. It’s about restraint — the decisions I consciously don’t make when I write for the internet, even when they might promise faster results.

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