"Don't repeat yourself."

We live in an era of minimal, efficient, and robotic prose.

But repetition done well brings an intangible magic to your writing.

18 types of repetition in Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut you can try out: There are dozens of formal, PhD-level, Latin-sounding types of repetition, like "epizeuxis," "anadiplosis," and "chiasmus."

Let's make it simple.

We'll break these 18 quotes into 3 groups: Stamps, Loops, and Mirrors.

Starting with Stamps ...

Paul McCartney and John Lennon are two of history's greatest songwriters.

I've been a hardcore fan / scholar for 15 years.

When you dissect their craft and history, you see how much of their process applies to the written word too.

The Beatles Guide to Writing: 1. Finish ideas quickly and move on

As teenagers, John & Paul skipped school to churn out songs. They wouldn't end the session until an idea was complete. Perfection wasn't the goal. They wrote over 100 "unsophisticated" unreleased songs to practice finishing ideas.

My wife got me a David Foster Wallace book for my birthday. She didn't know the first essay was a 57-page dive into a 1998 porn convention.

I read it twice, not only because it's outrageous, but because of the craft.

Here are 6 (non-vulgar) ways to write memorable observations: Express scale through metaphors, not numbers.

Most people don't have a concept of how big 130,000 square feet is. But since Wallace uses "Walmarts" as a unit of scale, it's easy to grasp the magnitude of this Vegas casino.

Metaphors help the reader see what you mean.

I've given feedback on over 500 essays in Write of Passage, and I run a daily "Feedback Gym."

After 1:1 breakout rooms, we each share one meta-point on the writing process.

Here's a thread of the writing wisdom we've gathered: 1. Sometimes you need to draft 3,000 words to be able to summarize your piece in 3 words, so you can then write a 300 word essay.

Pumped to start Write of Passage this week with @david_perell and @will_mannon

I was convinced to sign up because of the similarities this course seems to share with my experiences in architecture school.

Here's a thread on how design studio builds inter-disciplinary skills: 1. You are given open-ended assignments with shared constraints:

The semester starts by defining the project site & programmatic requirements. The design problem can be interpreted in an infinite amount of ways, but students learn from seeing how others tackle the same premise.