I’ve written about how Cory Doctorow consciously separates how he feels about his writing from the writing itself:
“My writing epiphany was there was no relation to the way I felt about the words I was writing and their objective quality. … You can’t tell what’s good and what’s bad while you’re writing it. … Once you start thinking about what you’re writing, you lose the ability to stop writing it.”
Read the rest here.
In the 2010s, I heard Tim Ferriss share a phrase that guided his work: what would this look like if this were easy?
A question I’ve been asking myself this spring is: What if this were fun?
Most of my best work has come from doing something fun. It’s the rule of cool! Having fun is fun, and fun is contagious. You can tell when a writer is bored by their subject and putting no effort into making it more engaging or readable. You can also tell when a writer is having fun, like Bill Bryson or Hunter S. Thompson or Charles Portis.
Read the rest here.
