Lessons Learned in 2011

merlin:

meghanagain:

fightwithknives:

  1. Just like you didn’t see 27 Dresses when it came out, begin avoiding 95% of writing that uses personal pronouns, which means almost everything online. It doesn’t matter if it’s written by someone you’ve met in real life, or in a publication you’ve read any liked before. If it’s someone who claims “my ‘I’ gives me transparency,” they are playing football and you want to be watching Nadal. Their way is not wrong, but it’s certainly not to your taste.
  2. If there’s no flow or style, don’t bother with that either.
  3. Also, collect a blacklist of bylines and URLs that make you angry, and avoid them, too. Sure it’s Nixonian, but it will also help you write more about things you care about writing about… rather than writing about things that piss you off.
  4. Reading work that pisses you off doesn’t help you “see what’s out there” because it’s really easy to see what’s out there with a glance, and not an in-depth engagement.
  5. The internet systems of writing suck. It’s a forced pissoff economy. Go to Slate and Salon and read “why x is ying z” or “the 8 people who give you reasons to hate everything” or any other “cliffhanger clickthrough” headlines and ignore all of them. Write down the number of times per month you learn anything from one of those stories. (It’s zero, or maybe one.) There’s no worthy payoff from a cliffhanger, just write a hook. A cliffhanger is not a hook. A cliffhanger lacks the style and intrigue of a complex detail or imperfect theme.
  6. There is joy joy joy everywhere amid all the bullshit and your job is to find the joy in the bullshit, even when the joy is just in the craft of it, even if you are reporting on it, find the fucking joy, and the joy is not in yourself, writers are conduits not subjects, or at least writers make joy by constructing it within the worst of situations. “Joy” in this context is not so much “happiness” as “exuberance.”
  7. It feels good to write sentences like the sentences in point 6, but keep them on your blog and not in your serious writing.
  8. The best cure for bad internet is making your own thing that is not a response to another thing but building your own whatever. 
  9. Stop reading bad writing. Keep writing good writing.

re: 3 (and 4 and 5)… the secret to my success is the mindful browsing safari plugin

re: 8… building magic map and busvetica was fun, and it’s been great to hear from people who like it. working on my own version of telestrator 2 was a lot more rewarding than dealing with the guy working on the original version. I need to do more of that.

This was posted 5 months ago. It has 145 notes.
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    knives: Lessons Learned
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    meta or something?
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    bullshit” “The...whatever.” “Stop
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