Category Archives: Writing

Joan Didion writes about people who keep and carry notebooks with them wherever they go:

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Journalists always have a notebook with them — to record impressions or jot down that perfect opening sentence for a future story. It is the first dumping ground of their ideas. It's a physical artifact of their curiosity.

It's always good to see journalistic instincts in non-journalists. Yesterday I met with a technologist who, in the first five minutes of our dinner, pulled out a notebook to make notes. It was a terrific first impression on me.

Here's my post analyzing pros and cons of taking notes in an informal lunch/dinner meeting. Here's my post on the importance of capturing your fringe-thoughts. Moleskine notebooks are in-style but I prefer spiral ringed notebooks of equivalent size because I can clip a pen to it easily.

(thanks Steve Dodson for pointing out this essay)

On British novelist Zadie Smith's new collection of essays, entitled Changing My Mind, reviewer Ella Taylor writes:

Taken together, they reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous, erudite and earnestly open mind that's busy refining its view of life, literature and a great deal in between. Delightful, painful and spontaneously funny…

Lively, rigorous, erudite, unselfconscious, earnestly open-minded, delightful, painful, spontaneously funny: not a bad set of adjectives.

I am always interested in how you can describe really talented people. "Smart" has been overused to be devoid of meaning. The most original and descriptive adjective from the above list is: unselfconscious.

Here's my review of Smith's On Beauty.

On his book tour in San Francisco, the noted crime novelist James Ellroy said:

I'm interested in doing very few things. I don't have a cell phone. Don't have a computer. Don't have a TV set. Don't go to movies. Don't read. I ignore the world so I might live obsessively.

This seems to be the case among many mega-successful people. They are obsessed with their talent. They can do little else, even if they've already hit it big. You see it a lot in writers like Ellroy. The very best entrepreneurs seem to be this way, as well. Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal, can't get off the saddle, even after making lots of money. He's now famously a workaholic at Slide.

###

Here's how James Ellroy began a recent public appearance:

Good evening peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps. I'm James Ellroy, the demon dog, the foul owl with the death growl, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I'm the author of 16 books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. These books will leave you reamed, steamed and drycleaned, tie-dyed, swept to the side, true-blued, tattooed and bah fongooed. These are books for the whole fuckin' family, if the name of your family is the Manson Family.

Steven Pressfield shares his #1 lesson for anybody in the working world:

Nobody wants to read your shit.

He explains:

The market doesn’t know what you’re selling and doesn’t care. Your potential customers are so busy dealing with the rest of their lives, they haven’t got a spare second to give to your product/work of art/business, no matter how worthy or how much you love it.

What’s your answer to that?

1) Reduce your message to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form.

2) Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative.

3) Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.

When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.

In school anything you write or do will be read and graded by a teacher paid to do so. In the real world nobody wants to read your shit, and you have to earn their attention every single day.

Last year in a post titled You Have to Make People Give a Shit, I extolled blogging as a way to learn this value.

One way blogging makes you a better writer is it forces you to work hard for your readers' attention. On the web, it takes less than a second to close the page or click a new link. Your readers are busy and distracted.

This means you must engage the reader out of the gate and take nothing for granted. If you start sucking in the second paragraph, you'll likely lose the reader's attention. They click to a new page.

It's brutal. It makes you better.

‘…the most useful definition of creativity is the following: people are artistically creative when they love what they are doing, know what they are doing, and actively engage in art-making. The three elements of creativity are thus loving, knowing and doing; or heart, mind and hands; or, as Zen Buddhist teaching has it, great faith, great question, and great courage.’

Loving, knowing, doing. The secret behind becoming excellent at anything is loving one thing deep and hard enough to do it for a very long time. To continue to learn and know it.

That's Eric Maisel via Justine Musk, in her epic post on why you have to read like a maniac to develop a writer's intuition. Later she says:

Don’t just read because it will make you a better writer – although it will. Read because you love to read, you love stories of all shapes and sizes, you love the flow and rhythms and innovations of language, you love to learn stuff about people, you love to learn stuff about the world, you love to form relationships with individuals who don’t exist. Read because you love to write. Read because you love fiction and nonfiction and their pirate chests of treasures.

I can't imagine being interested in writing and not subscribing to Justine's blog.