Notes on Writing Well

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writing

Michael Nielsen keeps a set of rough working notes on writing. He calls them notes, not polished prose, but they’re full of ideas I keep coming back to.

Good writing is good psychology. Rules like “avoid adverbs” or “omit needless words” usually come without a reason. Nielsen’s point is that good writing isn’t a property of the text. It’s a property of the relationship between the reader and the text, so useful advice is about how to change that relationship.

One purpose. A good piece has a single, sharp purpose, and every part of it, even the digressions, should serve that purpose. The failure mode he calls discursive disease: you’re writing about gardens, then you add that good thought you had about rainforests, and now the piece is sort of about both and really about neither. His fix is to write the purpose at the top of the draft and reread it every time you sit down. Anything that doesn’t fit gets filed away for another piece, the way Aaron Sorkin’s leftover material from The American President went on to become The West Wing.

It’s hard to write the truth. Early drafts are full of the written version of “you know what I mean”. The only fix he knows is to revise over and over, asking of each sentence whether it can be sharper, and whether you actually believe it.

Beware words you wouldn’t say out loud. They’re usually there to sound authoritative, which serves the writer, not the reader.

A few smaller ones worth stealing:

  • Write one true sentence. Hemingway’s way out of being stuck. Start with the simplest true thing you know and go from there.
  • Stop when you know what comes next. Also Hemingway. If you end each session mid-flow, you’ll never start the next one stuck.
  • Brainstorm ten opening sentences. When the first line won’t come, don’t settle for a mediocre one. Write ten quickly, then judge them.
  • Start as late as possible. Ask whether the opening sentence could begin further in.
  • Don’t announce that something is interesting. “It’s interesting to consider…” tells the reader how to feel instead of making them feel it, and quietly suggests the topic sounds boring. Just say “Consider…”, then make it interesting.
  • “Very” is the worst adverb. “She looked very angry” loses little without it. Where the intensity matters, swap the phrase for something specific: “Jake would very much like lunch” becomes “Jake was ravenous for lunch”.