#let me tell you this unrelated anecdote about John

[fireintheimpala]

I can’t believe there’s a whole book devoted to Paul McCartney not explaining his lyrics.

[terrence-silver]

Could you write something for Terry with the prompt : “ thank you for seeing all the good in me” maybe after their first argument or disagreement?? Or whoever you wish to use the prompt. much love xx

Sociopath.

Addict.

Maniac.

Those were some of the few milder epithets Terry juggled throughout his life, unfettered. He mostly wore them as a badge of honor in the 80's, laughing it off with impossible nonchalance. Everything's easy when you're young. Everything's a laugh. A riot. And it was. It was unbelievably funny to watch people in their feelings around him, especially in the negative sense. He'd lie if he said that it didn't amuse him. Entertain him like an elaborate circus act. In his later years, he took to masking himself. There was therapy and then there was pretense, and the two weren't mutually exclusive to him --- meds numbed whatever proclivity he had for the darker aspects of himself. Violence. Wrath. Vices. The rest was his own self control. His own discipline. Self-maintance. Sometimes, an unspoken fact of life was that no matter how many times people repeated the age old fortune cookie mantra that you should just be yourself and let everyone accept you for who you are, flaws and all, it was all a pile of bullshit. No they wouldn't, Terry thought. Not with the type of fatal flaws Terry had anyway --- even though he didn't consider them as such, living inside and outside of himself. Biggest lie invented by society since taxing the poor. He couldn't even tell most people he served in Vietnam or that he was a Karate blackbelt most of the times without raising eyebrows, so he didn't. Be the snake and the grass it hides in.

Except, you were the odd one out.

A bit of a freak yourself, endearingly enough.

Terry's told you everything, right off the bat, going into the other end of the extreme, utilizing what his therapist called oversharing or trauma dumping during their sessions in the past. Terry supposed he hoped to deliberately scare you off. Disgust you tactically. Take perverted pleasure in watching your pretty little face twist in a mask of mistrust and anxiety as he regals you with some lovely anecdotes from his past and present. All innocence gone from your expression, so he'd have an excuse to be angry at you and hurt you in retaliation, pestered and invigorated in his rage by your hapless excuses while your tone of voice concealed true dread. Except, you never did and his desire for revenge against someone, anyone, stood there impotent, useless. Terry told you about his penchant for aggressive outburst, cocaine addiction which he treated, problems with alcohol, the dabbling of his toxic waste disposal business and a barrage of other things he'd hoped would be a mood killer. He'd even tell you about the war. How he nearly died, alongside everyone else, in that cage in the jungle, not withstanding all the countless other times he nearly got offed unrelated to that one instant and he would've if it wasn't for John. You offered to draw him a bath, after all of that. Make him a warm beverage. Help him relax.

He's told you about the horrors of his life and you were offering him a drink?

A...warm beverage?

A warm beverage.

He stares at it.

If there was a dosage of cyanide in there, he'd call it a blessing.

-“Thank you for seeing all the good in me.”-

Terry whispers into his own distorted reflection in the deep, brown liquor of a tea cup after approximately five minutes of mutual silence, his voice feeling even more gravely in his throat than it usually does, the quietude total all around you two --- not the uncomfortable kind, but silence is silence nonetheless. He feels on guard and yet not. Maybe the fact that he wasn't on his guard ironically put him on his guard because he couldn't comprehend why this felt so natural. He can't believe he's said that either --- thank you for seeing the good in me --- what the actual fuck!? Cursing himself internally, seated on a couch, legs crossed, feeling like a cretin. He's been having this thing with you for a while now and somehow, in a short amount of time, he's opened up to you more then he would've have to people he's known double the amount --- he's been accepted by you with more thoroughness out of the blue as well, than most people he's kept in his circles. Emphasis on the kept, past tense, seeing as how they were mercifully no longer in it. He looks up at you, holding the tea and there you are, smiling. Not a mocking smile. Not a fake smile. Not a rehearsed smile. A gleeful, cold smile. A genuine, true, gentle smile. Terry knows the differences like he knows the palm of his own hand. He tries the tea too, taking a tentative sip. He had a private chef fixing him up his deals and drinks, but this was...well, it was delightful. So were you. His wide-eyed little idealist.

Terry wants you.

But, he finds he wants you to see the good in only him.

Nobody else.

[junker-town]

This week in weird baseball includes freaky doppelgängers and rookies

Everything stops until we get an answer about the Brady Feigl situation. Unless you’re talking about the Angels’ retro uniforms, which are perfect.

Welcome to This Week In Dumb Baseball, which is a better name for a weekly column about dumb baseball than Grant Land is, but we’re not here to talk about the past. Maybe a rebranding is in our future.

Rest assured, though, there will always be dumb baseball to cover in this spot. Baseball is overflowing with dumb baseball. Like sap from a maple, we have to collect it, or it will go to waste.

Sometimes, though, the baseball isn’t dumb. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Our first section is a case in point, so ...

Let us study this baseball thing

If you’re reading on Apple News, Google AMP, or Cars.com.tv, please click here to watch this video. It’s worth it.

Luis Urias is just 21, so he hasn’t exactly been waiting since the ‘60s for his major league debut, but it’s still one of the seminal moments of any ballplayer’s life. It’s the realization of a dream that’s been years and years and years in the making. Urias worked hard to get there, and he jogged out to the field for the first time, adrenaline zipping through his body, as he tried not to look up at the second deck and get dizzy.

The first pitch comes in as he gets into his ready position, and it’s a strike. He relaxes a bit and refocuses. The second pitch is thrown, and he gets into his ready position again.

A player who is unable to concentrate in these circumstances is one who might not make it out of A-ball. We talk a lot about the five tools, but there are more than that, and the sixth is something of an implied tool that every major leaguer has by definition. It’s the ability to compartmentalize your brain in a way that allows you to function in moments of extreme excitement and/or stress.

Don’t sleep on just how beautiful Urias’s play was, either. It was full extension on a hard-hit ball, with no margin for error, and ...

Which one of these players is Brady Feigl? Trick question: they are both named Brady Feigl. One is in the Rangers system, and the other is in the A's system. pic.twitter.com/nCIufSkpdQ

— Levi Weaver (@ThreeTwoEephus) September 1, 2018

... and, uh ... that’s weird, wonder how that tweet snuck in there ... anyway, Urias dives and makes the first play of his major league career, and it happens to be one of the most brilliant plays he might make all ....

... now just hold on a second, that tweet can’t be right, can it? It would still be a thing if there were a John Anderson playing professional baseball and a John Anderson playing professional basketball and they even remotely looked similar. It would also still be a thing if there were two players who looked this similar, even if their names were different. But you’re telling me that these two players, with what should be unique names, play the same position in the same sport and also happen to look ...

Sorry, I’m sorry. No, we have to celebrate Urias, one of the Padres’ top prospects and a reason you just might be paying attention to them as soon as next year. It’s possible that this play will make for an incredible anecdote in the book about his career, after all, a perfect start to ...

... wait, wait, wait, alright, let’s use science to figure this out. Brady Feigl A was born in 1990, when the first name “Brady” was the 315th-most popular baby name in the United States. Brady Feigl B was born in 1995, when his first name was the 188th-most popular name. There have been just four Bradys in the major leagues, for example. So right off the bat, we have a freak coincident.

But then there’s the last name. According to this website, Feigl is the 105,814th most-common surname in the world, and just 4,492 people have this name, with most of them in Europe. Just one Feigl should exist among every 1,084,839 Americans, which means just the odds of there being two unrelated Feigls in professional alone should be statistically unlikely.

Here’s a vast list of surnames. Feigl isn’t included.

Dammit, no, back to Urias and the Padres, and, wait, then you start talking about the odds it takes to become a professional baseball player in the first place. How many kids are drafted, and how big is the potential pool of amateur baseball players? We’re talking one in 10,000, right?

They have to be related, even if they’re just distant cousins. This is the only solution. Then you would eliminate some of the statistical noise because if they share genes, then it’s not that freaky that they look alike or each share a similar athletic talent. That would explain a great deal of this, to be honest.

We have to convince them to take one of those DNA tests.

By court order, if necessary.

That was a great play or whatever, but now I can’t sleep.

We need to arrest both of them until this gets settled.

The unwritten rules of screaming at no one in particular

Again, you’ll need to click if you’re on an aggregating site, but via Reddit, we have Lance Lynn reacting strongly to a strikeout, and it’s a doozy.

Lynn screams, “Fork’s to you, muddling forger!” or something roughly equivalent after striking out Daniel Palka in the first inning, but it’s hard to imagine that he was expressly upset at Palka. Consider that ...

Palka is a rookie who had faced Lynn just five times before, so there couldn’t have been a history between them

Especially considering that the only hit Palka had was an infield single, so there wasn’t the chance of a rogue bat flip.

It was the first inning, which lessens the chances of some sort of jawing between them.

There was no chicanery during the at-bat, no arguing that a strike should have been a ball, or anything else that would have upset a pitcher.

One Brady was from Missouri, and one was from Maryland, which doesn’t have to mean anything, but it’s not like they were living close enough to be aware of each other, so this is as much of a surprise to them as it is to us

So our question is this: Is Lance Lynn breaking an unwritten rule by screaming obscenities at the sky? To answer it, we need to know who the “you” is in the epithet. Is it directed toward the umpire for calling two borderline pitches a strike? Is it directed at the hitter, who is Lynn’s natural enemy just for existing? Is it, like, directed toward God, man? Or is it just something that came from the top of his head, instinctively?

If it’s the latter, it’s probably not breaking an unwritten rule. It’s just a chemical reaction that leads to an especially spicy catch phrase, no more. Eventually it will get Lynn into trouble, and he should consider replacing it with something like, “Now that’s a spicy fastball!.”

But if it’s any of the others, I’m going to say it’s breaking an unwritten rule, and possibly a couple of written ones. You probably shouldn’t scream “blank you, motherblanker” to an umpire or an opponent, and you certainly shouldn’t scream that and replace the “blanks” with naughty words.

For violating this unwritten rule, I sentence Lynn to 20 jumping jacks. Also, I’ve decided that the new punishment for unwritten-rule violations is to do jumping jacks on the field before the start of an inning, and the idea that baseballs need to be thrown intentionally at batters is hereby eliminated.

Show me where the flaw in that plan is, and we can have a civil discussion, but guess what? There is no flaw.

Baseball picture of the week

Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images

The definitive feature on Willians Astudillo has already been written, and that absolutely crushes me. Curse you, Lindbergh. Curse you.

The abridged version is that Astudillo is a multi-positional marvel who is primarily a catcher, nearly impossible to walk or strike out, and of a mirthful and jolly countenance that the internet seems to enjoy more than anything else in the sport. There are baseball players named, like, Brandon Dallard who will come and go without doing a single memorable thing, and they’ll need to carry a baseball card in their wallet just to prove to their parents that they really did make the majors. And then there is a player like Astudillo, who is already a cult hero.

That picture up there is of Astudillo’s first home run, and it captures an awful lot of the fun involved. After not smiling around the bases — and baseball players trying not to smile after their first home run is one of the purest moments on any baseball field — he lets the smile fly in the dugout, and the picture captures the sense of wonder in his eyes and the pure enjoyment in his face.

If there were no Willians Astudillo, we would not have to invent him. He would just not exist, and our lives would be that much more drab. But he does exist, and he tends to make baseball more fun. Here’s a picture capturing that, and it’s glorious.

Rate this retro uniform

Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images

I really, really have to be careful here. I don’t want to be reactionary or hyperbolic. Let’s study this like something hanging in a museum and walk around it, lips pursed, hand to our chin.

...

Yeah, I have to go with A+. I know that this might be rank nostalgia, and there are subconscious forces working behind the scenes to make me appreciate these uniforms more than someone who didn’t grow up with them, but I can’t shake the idea that these are perfect.

Here’s the current Angels home jersey:

Photo by Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Getty Images

It’s fine, I guess. The font is a little nü-metal, but whatever. The colors are fine. Nothing about it is offensive.

That retro one is gorgeous, though, and the Angels should bring it back permanently.

This is how the Royals-Orioles series went this weekend

Your browser does not support HTML5 video.

Do you want to learn more about the decline and fall of these two teams? Boy, do I have the feature for you ...

The Orioles were swept, by the way. They were swept, and Royals fans are at least a little annoyed that it will probably cost them the first-overall pick next June. That’s all just so perfect.

What Shohei Did

He pitched, dang it. He pitched and he FREAKED US ALL OUT.

Ohtani's velocity trends tonight are absolutely horrifying pic.twitter.com/2l0aUPamUM

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) September 3, 2018

A pitcher with a partial ligament tear who doesn’t Tommy John, coming back sooner than expected and then throwing nearly 10 MPH slower than normal?

Yes. Yes, I would, Kent.

All was well, though. All was well. Relatively speaking.

Mike Scioscia said Ohtani’s back stiffened up and his finger was a little sore from bare-handing the comebacker. That led to decline in velo. He said his elbow is fine. #Angels

— Jeff Fletcher (@JeffFletcherOCR) September 3, 2018

Not great. But not the apocalypse, either. For good measure, Ohtani also drove in a couple runs, and it’s probably a good sign that he’s pitching for a team that isn’t in contention, and he remains the most watchable player in sports.

On the other hand, stop freaking us out. I can’t take much more of this.

I really hope Wilson Ramos is hurt

I never thought I would write a sentence like that, but, here, let me explain myself:

If he’s not hurt, that means he’s lollygagging. Nobody likes a lollygagger. And this would be 80-grade lollygagging. Even the announcers wondered if Ramos was just flat-out unable to run there.

Unless he’s just that slow. This would be even worse than the 80-grade lollygagging. A player running first-to-third at sub-Molina speeds would be much, much more concerning. This would be almost untenable speed — the kind that would get Ramos thrown out on a ground-ball single to center.

So I’ll stick with the header. I hope Ramos has a wonky hamstring or something, and he’s just nursing it. He’ll get better, and you won’t see this again.

It is, by far, the best possible scenario. I hope you understand. I’m not trying to be a jerk.

This week in McGwire/Sosa

McGwire 23 AB this week 427 AB for the season

2 HR this week 55 HR for the season

.261/.414/.609 this week .293/.472/.724 for the season

Sosa 30 AB this week 540 AB for the season

4 HR this week 55 for the season

.333/.394/.767 this week .313/.381/.654 for the season

Sosa and McGwire are both on pace for 69 homers, which is incredibly nice. Pitchers are scared to come inside to them because they don’t want to be the dingus who ruined everything. It’s almost certainly going to be the year that Roger Maris’ home run record falls.

But what if it isn’t?

What if it isn’t?

Again, I’ll have to remind you that the fate of the world rested on this.

Spoonerism of the week

This one is a reader submission, and I would like to thank Justin for reaching out. It’s a beautiful spoonerism.

Ah, a player from my own backyard, I can definitely appreciate this. If you’re a spooner-literalist, the correct adaptation is Gumpsie Preen, and it’s incredibly fun to say. Just rolls off the tongue. Your daughter has six out of the seven Gumpsie Preen books in her library, and she won’t be satisfied until you buy her the last one. Go on. Don’t wait for a sale. Encourage her love for reading.

But if you want to be a little more daring and take an additional consonant, Grumpsie Peen is next level. Take the Grumpsie Peen Challenge and say it out loud.

Grumpsie Peen.

Anyway, the point is that I always welcome your submissions, and also that I’m almost disappointed that my fascination with there being two Jeffs D’Amico and two Steves Ontiveros is ruined because there are two Bradys Feigl, and they look exactly alike. Once we have them in custody, we should get more answers, though.

[writingguide003-blog]

44 Writing Hacks From Some of the Greatest Writers Who Ever Lived

New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/must-see/44-writing-hacks-from-some-of-the-greatest-writers-who-ever-lived/

44 Writing Hacks From Some of the Greatest Writers Who Ever Lived

Writing looks fun, but doing it professionally is hard. Like really hard. Why on earth am I doing this?-hard.

Which is probably why so many people want to write, yet so few actually do. But there are ways to make it easier, as many writers can tell you. Tricks that have been discovered over the centuries to help with this difficult craft.

In another industry, these tricks would be considered trade secrets. But writers are generous and they love to share (often in books about writing). They explain their own strategies for how to deal with writers block to how to make sure your computer never eats your manuscript. They give away this hard-won knowledge so that other aspiring writers wont have to struggle in the same way. Over my career, Ive tried to collect these little bits of wisdom in my commonplace book (also a writers trick which I picked up from Montaigne) and am grateful for the guidance theyve provided.

Below, Ive shared a collection of writing hacks from some amazing writers like Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Anne Lamott, and Raymond Chandler. I hope its not too presumptuous but I snuck in a few of my own too (not that I think Im anywhere near as good as them).

Anyway, heres to making this tough job a tiny bit easier!

[*] When you have an idea for an article or a bookwrite it down. Dont let it float around in your head. Thats a recipe for losing it. As Beethoven is reported to have said, If I don’t write it down immediately I forget it right away. If I put it into a sketchbook I never forget it, and I never have to look it up again.

[*] The important thing is to start. At the end of John Fantes book Dreams from Bunker Hill, the character, a writer, reminds himself that if he can write one great line, he can write two and if he can write two he can write three, and if he can write three, he can write forever. He pauses. Even that seemed insurmountable. So he types out four lines from one of his favorite poems. What the hell, he says, a man has to start someplace.

[*] In fact, a lot of writers use that last technique. In Tobias Wolffs autobiographical novel Old School, the character types the passages from his favorite books just to know what it feels like to have those words flow through his fingertips. Hunter S. Thompson often did the same thing. This is another reason why technologies like ebooks and Evernote are inferior to physical interaction. Just highlighting something and saving it to a computer? Theres no tactile memory there.

[*] The greatest part of a writers time is spent in reading; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. Samuel Johnson

[*] Tim Ferriss has said that the goal for a productive writing life is two crappy pages a day. Just enough to make progress, not too ambitious to be intimidating.

[*] They say breakfast (protein) in the morning helps brain function. But in my experience, thats a trade-off with waking up and getting started right away. Apparently Kurt Vonnegut only ate after he worked for 2 hours. Maybe he felt like after that hed earned food.

[*] Michael Malice has advised dont edit while you write. I think this is good advice.

[*] In addition to making a distinction between editing and writing, Robert Greene advises to make an equally important distinction between research and writing. Trying to find where youre going while youre doing it is begging to get horribly lost. Writing is easier when the research is done and the framework has been laid out.

[*] Nassim Taleb wrote in Antifragile that every sentence in the book was a derivation, an application or an interpretation of the short maxim he opened with. THAT is why you want to get your thesis down and perfect. It makes the whole book/essay easier.

[*] Break big projects down into small, discrete chunks. As I am writing a book, I create a separate document for each chapter, as I am writing them. Its only later when I have gotten to the end that these chapters are combined into a single file. Why? The same reason it feels easier to swim seven sets of ten laps, than to swim a mile. Breaking it up into pieces makes it seem more achievable. The other benefit in writing? It creates a sense that each piece must stand on its own.

[*] Embrace what the strategist and theorist John Boyd called the draw-down period. Take a break right before you start. To think, to reflect, to doubt.

[*] On being a writer: All the days of his life he should be reading as faithfully as his partaking of food; reading, watching, listening. John Fante

[*] Dont get caught up with pesky details. When I am writing a draft, I try not to be concerned with exact dates, facts or figures. If I remember that a study conducted by INSERT UNIVERSITY found that XX% of businesses fail in the first FIVE/SIX? months, thats what I write (exactly like that). If I am writing that on June XX, 19XX Ronald Reagan gave his famous Tear Down This Wall speech in Berlin in front of XX,XXX people, thats how its going to look. Momentum is the most important thing in writing, so Ill fill the details in later. I just need to get the sentences down first. “Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” is how Joshua Wolf Shenk put it.

[*] Raymond Chandler had a trick of using small pieces of paper so he would never be afraid to start over. Also with only 12-15 lines per page, it forced economy of thought and actionwhich is why his stuff is so readable.

[*] In The Artists Way, Julia Cameron reminds us that our morning pages and our journaling dont count as writing. Just as walking doesnt count as exercise, this is just priming the pumpits a meditative experience. Make sure you treat it as such.

[*] Steven Pressfield said that he used to save each one of his manuscripts on a disk that hed keep in the glovebox of his car. Robert Greene told me he sometimes puts a copy of his manuscript in the trunk of his car just in case. I bought a fireproof gun safe and keep my stuff in therejust in case.

[*] My editor Niki Papadopoulos at Penguin: Its not what a book is. Its what a book does.

[*] While you are writing, read things totally unrelated to what youre writing. Youll be amazed at the totally unexpected connections youll make or strange things youll discover. As Shelby Foote put it in an interview with The Paris Review: I cant begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.

[*] Writing requires what Cal Newport calls deep workperiods of long, uninterrupted focus and creativity. If you dont give yourself enough of this time, your work suffers. He recommends recording your deep work time each dayso you actually know if youre budgeting properly.

[*] Software does not make you a better writer. Fuck Evernote. Fuck Scrivner. You dont need to get fancy. If classics were created with quill and ink, youll probably be fine with a Word Document. Or a blank piece of paper. Dont let technology distract you. As Joyce Carol Oates put it in an interview, Every writer has written by hand until relatively recent times. Writing is a consequence of thinking, planning, dreaming this is the process that results in writing, rather than the way in which the writing is recorded.

[*] Talk about the ideas in the work everywhere. Talk about the work itself nowhere. Dont be the person who tweets Im working on my novel. Be too busy writing for that. Helen Simpson has Faire et se taire from Flaubert on a Post-it near her desk, which she translates as Shut up and get on with it.

[*] Why cant you talk about the work? Its not because someone might steal it. Its because the validation you get on social media has a perverse effect. Youll less likely to put in the hard work to complete something that youve already been patted (or patted yourself) on the back for.

[*] When you find yourself stuck with writers block, pick up the phone and call someone smart and talk to them about whatever the specific area youre stuck with is. Not that youre stuck, but about the topic. By the time you put your phone down, youll have plenty to write. (As Seth Godin put it, nobody gets talkers block.)

[*] Keep a commonplace book with anecdotes, stories and quotes you can always usefrom inspiration to directly using in your writing. And these can be anything. H.L. Mencken for example, would methodically fill a notebook with incidents, recording scraps of dialogue and slang, columns from the New York Sun.

[*] As you write down quotes and observations in your commonplace book, make sure to do it by hand. As Raymond Chandler wrote, when you have to use your energy to put words down, you are more apt to make them count.

[*] Elizabeth Gilbert has a good trick for cutting: As you go along, Ask yourself if this sentence, paragraph, or chapter truly furthers the narrative. If not, chuck it. And as Stephen King famously put it, kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribblers heart, kill your darlings.

[*] Strenuous exercise everyday. For me, and for a lot of other writers, its running. Novelist Don DeLillo told The Paris Review how after writing for four hours, he goes running to shake off one world and enter another. Joyce Carol Oates, in her ode to running, said that the twin activities of running and writing keep the writer reasonably sane and with the hope, however illusory and temporary, of control.

[*] Ask yourself these four questions from George Orwell: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? Then finish with these final two questions: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

[*] As a writer you need to make use of everything that happens around you and use it as material. Make use of Seinfelds question: Im never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I am thinking, Can I do something with that?

[*] Airplanes with no wifi are a great place to write and even better for editing. Because there is nowhere to go and nothing else to do.

[*] Print and put a couple of important quotes up on the wall to help guide you (either generally, or for a specific project). Heres a quote from a scholar describing why Ciceros speeches were so effective which I put on my wall while I was writing my first book. At his best [Cicero] offered a sustained interest, a constant variety, a consummate blend of humour and pathos, of narrative and argument, of description and declamation; while every part is subordinated to the purpose of the whole, and combines, despite its intricacy of detail, to form a dramatic and coherent unit. (emphasis mine)

[*] Focus on what youre saying, worry less about how. As William March wrote in The Bad Seed, A great novelist with something to say has no concern with style or oddity of presentation.

[*] A little trick I came up with. After every day of work, I save my manuscript as a new file (for example: EgoIsTheEnemy2-26.docx) which is saved on my computer and in Dropbox (before Dropbox, I just emailed it to myself). This way I keep a running record of the evolution of book. It comforts me that I can always go back if I mess something up or if I have to turn back around.

[*] Famous ad-man David Ogilvy put it bluntly: Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

[*] Envision who you are writing this for. Like really picture them. Dont go off in a cave and do this solely for yourself. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in his interview with The Paris Review: …every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. Thats the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.

[*] Do not chase exotic locations to do some writing. Budd Schulbergs novel The Disenchanted about his time with F. Scott Fitzgerald expresses the dangers well: It was a time everyone was pressing wonderful houses on us. I have a perfectly marvelous house for you to write in, theyd say. Of course no one needs marvelous houses to write in. I still knew that much. All you needed was one room. But somehow the next house always beckoned.”

[*] True enough, though John Fante said that when you get stuck writing, hit the road.

[*] Commitments (at the micro-level) are important too. An article a week? An article a month? A book a year? A script every six weeks? Pick something, but commit to itpublicly or contractually. Quantity produces quality, as Ray Bradbury put it.

[*] Dont ever write anything you dont like yourself and if you do like it, dont take anyones advice about changing it. They just dont know. Raymond Chandler

[*] Neil Strauss and Tucker Max gave me another helpful iteration of that idea (which I later learned is from Neil Gaiman): When someone tells you something is wrong with your writing, theyre usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, theyre almost always wrong.

[*] Ogilvy had another good rule: Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

[*] Print out the work and edit it by hand as often as possible. It gives you the readers point of view.

[*] Hemingway advised fellow writer Thomas Wolfe to break off work when you ‘are going good.’Then you can rest easily and on the next day easily resume. Brian Koppelman (Rounders, Billions) has referred to this as stopping on wet edge. It staves off the despair the next day.

[*] Keep the momentum: Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether. Jeanette Winterson

That taps me out for now. But every time I read I compile a few more notecards. Ill update you when Ive got another round to share.

In the meantime, stop reading stuff on the internet and get back to writing!

But if you have a second…share your own tips below.

Read more: http://thoughtcatalog.com/