Tag: writing

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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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 Lists Work

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Lists in writing are one of the most widely used and least examined forms. The bulleted list, the numbered list, the series of items separated by commas — these are so common in online writing that they have become the default structure for a large proportion of content. And yet the list is not a neutral format. It does specific things to information and to the reader’s relationship to that information, and understanding what it does — and what it cannot do — is more useful than either embracing it as efficient or rejecting it as lazy.

The list is a grammatical and rhetorical form with its own logic, its own appropriate uses, and its own characteristic failures. Using it deliberately requires understanding that logic rather than reaching for it because it is what writing on screens seems to require.

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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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The Language of Simplicity

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The language of simplicity is widely advocated and rarely examined. The advice to write simply — to use short words, short sentences, plain vocabulary — is given so consistently across writing guides, style manuals, and editorial feedback that it has come to function as a baseline requirement rather than a considered choice. Be clear. Be direct. Avoid complexity. This advice is not wrong, but it is incomplete, because it treats simplicity as though it were a default — as though plain language were the natural state of writing and complexity were something added on top of it.

The reality is more interesting. Simplicity in language is a choice, made against available alternatives, with its own costs and limitations. Understanding what the language of simplicity actually does — what it makes possible, what it forecloses, and when it is genuinely the right choice — is more useful than treating it as an unconditional virtue.

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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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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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What Is Tone In Writing?

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Tone in writing is one of the most frequently invoked and least precisely defined concepts in discussions of craft. Writers are told to find their tone, to be consistent in their tone, to adapt their tone to their audience. Editors flag tone problems. Writing guides devote chapters to it. And yet the concept is almost never defined with any precision — it is used as though its meaning were obvious, which tends to mean that different people are using it to mean different things.

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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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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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