The best pieces of writing advice I can come up with after doing it every day for five years:
1) If your ideas are boring, get a life.
2) If you already have a life and your ideas are still boring, you’re not listening carefully enough.
3) If you’re serious about becoming a better writer, do it in public.
4) Imitate your favorite writers.
5) You write to an audience, but everybody reads your work alone.
6) Mentally, the most important work you can do is to silence the voice inside your head that says “people will make fun of me for this idea” before you even write it.
7) People are interested in people so write about people.
8) To learn faster, stop getting so offended.
9) If you’re serious about writing, sit down at your computer every morning before the demands of the world smack you in the face.
10) Don't try to be clever. Just try to be right.
11) Don't try to be fancy. Just try to be descriptive.
12) Writing is a way to channel negative emotions. If you suppress them, you’ll also suppress your most honest and fire-branded ideas.
13) If you make up a name, make it interesting.
(There's a reason why so many celebrities have distinct names: Shaq, Oprah, Elvis, Spike Lee).
14) Make up your own words.
15) To emphasize an idea and signal to the reader that it's important and worth remembering, use a short sentence. Seriously. It works.
16) Every time you use a cliché, you've outsourced your thinking.
17) Write at the moment of epiphany.
18) Use the thesaurus to find words you know but didn’t think to write, and not ones that would've impressed your 10th-grade English teacher.
19) Chances are, you're not looking carefully enough. You're skimming your surroundings. Don't believe me? Try painting.
20) Take more notes.
21) No really, take more notes.
22) Most of the conversation about note-taking is too focused on capturing other people's ideas instead of your own epiphanies and observations.
23) If you're bored writing it, the reader will be bored reading it.
24) Your readers are a mirror of yourself. You get the ones you deserve.
25) Laugh more (there are stories of Kafka laughing so loud that he kept his neighbors up at night).
26) A busy schedule will suffocate the writer's spirit.
27) "Free time is nuclear fusion for creativity." — @will_mannon
28) These days, the hardest part of writing is trying to not get distracted by the Internet.
29) You don't need to have all the answers if you know how to take readers on a journey.
30) Learn to criticize your work without hating it (or yourself).
31) If your writing doesn't make you feel naked, it's probably not personal enough.
32) The paradox of creativity: Your work is done when it looks so simple that the consumer thinks they could've done it, which means they won't appreciate how hard you worked.
33) Readers are interested in who you actually are, not the person you wish they saw you as.
34) Almost all the writing on the Internet was written by somebody in a rush.
35) If you're stuck on an idea, move your body.
36) The fear of writing in public never goes away. You just get better at dealing with it.
37) If your ideas aren't spicy enough, rant to your friends more. Then write down the best things that spill out.
38) Reading will make you a better writer, but audiobooks don't count.
39) If you're writing for work, make it shorter.
40) If you're writing for Twitter, make it simpler.
41) If you're writing for pleasure, make it funner.
42) It's not a coincidence that so many great writers have memorized poetry and scripture.
43) In editing, your goal is simple: say more in fewer words.
44) Use fewer, but better examples.
45) Seek truth, not originality.
46) Write for one specific person, not a mass of abstract people.
(Warren Buffett addresses the early drafts of his shareholder letters to his sister, Dorothy. Once he finishes it, he replaces her name with "Shareholders.”)
47) Read to collect the dots. Write to connect them.
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