Author: emberleddy

To become a better writer, you should write every day. You should also avoid forcing it. You should outline extensively before starting. And you should stop outlining and just write. You should write for yourself. Just don’t forget to think about your audience. You should trust the reader, but make sure you never confuse the reader.

There is no shortage of writing advice out there.

Ask ten writers how to approach a project and you’ll receive at least twelve answers. Meanwhile, you’re sitting in front of a blank Google Doc trying to determine which successful stranger is responsible for your future success.

More often than not, writers are describing the solution to their problem, not necessarily yours.

A writer who can’t organize their ideas says, “Outline everything.”

A writer who can’t stop organizing their ideas says, “Just start writing.”

Imagine if directions worked this way. One person tells you to turn left. Another tells you to turn right. A third insists that maps are a limitation and you should trust your instincts. Most people would question the directions; writers are likely to question themselves.

The truth is, most writing advice is effective. Just not for everyone, all the time, for the same reason. 

A writer who spent six months outlining a project they never start has a very different problem than the writer who just produced twenty pages of material and refuses to revise a single sentence. Still, writing advice is often delivered as though all writers suffer from the same disease.

My feeling? Popular pieces of writing advice are less like rules and more like prescriptions. The challenge isn’t deciding whether they’re right, but whether they’re right for you. Otherwise, you’re treating a broken arm with cough syrup.

1. “Write every day”

This is probably the most famous piece of writing advice in existence. It is also one of the most difficult to argue with because it contains just enough truth to survive almost any counterexample.

If you write every day and improve, the advice worked. If you write every day and don’t improve, someone will explain that you weren’t writing correctly. If you miss a day and improve anyway, someone will point out that you write most days.

(For total transparency, the creation of this post involved several days of not writing it.)

It’s useful advice for writers who struggle to build momentum. It is less useful for the college student who just spent three consecutive days surviving exclusively on caffeine and is now feeling guilty for taking Tuesday off.

Often, productivity advice has a tendency to confuse correlation with causation. Maybe the famous novelist wrote every morning, or maybe the famous novelist simply had the time and circumstances to do so. The routine is easy to copy, while the life surrounding it typically isn’t.

Some writers need discipline, and others need a nap. “Just write” might be the writing equivalent of telling a depressed person to cheer up.

If writing every day helps you write, wonderful. If taking a day off helps you write, that’s still writing advice, even if it would make a sad motivational poster.

2. “Kill your darlings”

I personally suspect writers like this advice because it sounds dramatic. The words conjure an image of a writer staring sadly at the most beautiful sentence ever written before deleting it for the good of their manuscript.

But honestly? Most editing sessions are less theatrical than advertised. I am rarely forced to choose between artistic integrity and a beautiful sentence. Most of my editing decisions involve removing the word “really” and adding commas before independent clauses.

I think the popularity of this advice comes from how flattering it is. It assumes your biggest problem is having too many brilliant ideas. The obstacle isn’t that you’re incapable of writing a good sentence, but that you’ve become too attached to the abundance of good sentences you’ve already written.

There are worse things for a writer to believe about themselves.

“Kill your darlings” assumes a very specific writer who consistently overvalues their own work. It imagines a person who needs to be persuaded to let go. But this has not been my experience.

A lot of writers are so eager to be objective that they begin cutting away every unusual inclination they have. Eventually, there are no darlings left to kill. Just a draft that could’ve been written by anyone.

We hear a lot from writers whose darlings needed killing and far less from the writers who deleted every interesting instinct they had in pursuit of being concise or efficient. The evidence is naturally skewed toward the writers who benefited from cutting because it is much harder to recognize the observation, metaphor, or eccentric idea that disappeared too early and dragged the work’s personality along with it.

Yes, killing your darlings can result in stronger writing. But it can also result in excellent instruction manuals.

3. “Read more”

This advice is super straightforward until you start asking annoying questions: How much? And perhaps most importantly: What counts?

We spend most of the day reading. Text messages. Emails. News articles. Subtitles. Menus. Comment sections. The title of the “Terms and Conditions” before immediately clicking “Accept.”

When writers say “read more,” they rarely mean any of those things. They mean books. And they probably have an opinion about which books, too.

One writer reads a hundred books a year, another reads exclusively nineteenth-century Russian novels, a third learns everything from fanfiction, Wikipedia, and internet rabbit holes. Conventional wisdom would probably place them in that order.

I’m not convinced readers do.

The real value of reading has less to do with prestige than exposure. Books matter because they introduce us to experiences, ideas, and ways of thinking we wouldn’t have encountered alone. But books are not the only place those things live.

A writer who only reads literary fiction may develop beautiful prose while knowing surprisingly little about the world. Meanwhile, another writer spends three hours on Reddit reading about shipwrecks, tax fraud, and a man who attempted to mail himself across the country in a wooden crate. None of this information is inherently or immediately useful, but all of it somehow ends up in the writing. And if we’re being honest, the man in the crate is the thing you’re most likely to remember from this paragraph.

Reading isn’t valuable because it satisfies a quota. It’s valuable because it expands the range of things you can think about. The best readers I know aren’t necessarily the most literary; they’re the most curious.

4. “Find your voice”

This piece of advice is particularly fascinating because it implies that your authentic writing style is already fully formed somewhere inside you, waiting to be discovered. Anyone who has actually practiced writing for their whole life would find this idea extremely annoying: If my voice was already finished, what exactly have I been doing all this time? 

The truth is, most things we call voice are learned. They emerge from years of reading, writing, imitating, experimenting, failing, revising, and accidentally developing preferences. Voice is the residue of every word you’ve encountered before.

The more consciously you chase a voice, the more artificial it can become. People trying to “sound like themselves” often end up sounding like someone who is trying very hard to sound like themselves. The result is a sentence that feels less like self-expression and more like branding.

The advice also makes voice sound far more singular than it actually is. Most writers don’t have a voice, but several.

The version that appears in a college essay is not the version that appears in a text message, which is not the version that appears in a diary, which is not the version that appears when writing something you’re genuinely excited about.

None of these voices are necessarily fake; they’re just responding to different contexts.

Voice is less something you find than something you leave behind. Other people often notice it before you do. At which point they will tell you that you’ve found your voice. Which is a much more romantic explanation than years of practice.

5. “Write what you know”

I’ve never understood how this became one of the most popular pieces of writing advice. Taken literally, this advice would make historical fiction, fantasy, and most of science fiction impossible. Fortunately, writers have spent centuries ignoring it.

The real advice is probably something closer to: Write what you can emotionally understand.

If you can emotionally understand dragons and complex murder mysteries, then by all means, write about dragons and complex murder mysteries. Because while I have never personally commanded a medieval army or survived a zombie apocalypse, I have experienced embarrassment, uncertainty, fear, and regret. And I imagine those emotions remain surprisingly relevant when the zombies arrive.

The advice also underestimates how much of writing involves curiosity. A writer doesn’t need to know everything before they begin because half the fun is the learning. Research is the most socially acceptable way to become obsessed with something.

Writers often interpret “write what you know” as a restriction rather than an invitation.

By that logic, my entire body of work would consist of writing about college students staring at laptops. Which isn’t completely absent of conflict, but does limit the number of dragons.

This advice was never meant to restrict what you write about. It was meant to help you figure out where to start. So write what you don’t know, but don’t forget what you do.

6. “Show, don’t tell”

This is excellent advice right up until somebody becomes too committed to it. The phrase itself is oddly ambitious: It doesn’t suggest showing more, it suggests not telling. 

Showing and telling are continually treated like opposites when they’re actually teammates. Nobody says, “Always use a hammer, never use a screwdriver.” The usefulness of the tool depends entirely on what you’re trying to do.

Like, I could tell you that I am skeptical of this rule. Or I could spend three paragraphs describing the increasingly strained expression on my face as I type this section.

At some point, the information needs to be communicated.

Writers repeat this advice so often that it occasionally begins to sound like all forms of exposition are a moral failing. But if a character walks into a room covered in blood carrying an axe, I don’t necessarily need three pages of context clues to infer that he’s upset. (Maybe one or two, but certainly not three.)

Sometimes a scene deserves to be experienced, and sometimes information deserves to be delivered.

7. “Write for yourself”

This is one of the most comforting pieces of writing advice ever invented, but also one of the most confusing.

Some writers don’t need encouragement to prioritize their own interests. Some writers already write exclusively for themselves. You can usually identify them because reading their work feels like accidentally opening someone else’s freezer: Everything inside makes perfect sense to them, and the rest of us are doing our best. (These are the writers whose darlings may actually have it coming.)

The truth is that writing exists somewhere between self-expression and expression.

The moment another human being enters the equation, you are no longer writing exclusively for yourself. You are making decisions based on what another person knows, doesn’t know, understands, misunderstands, finds interesting, or finds boring. In other words, you’re thinking about an audience.

A novelist writes for readers. A journalist writes for readers. A screenwriter writes for viewers. Even a diary is often written for a future version of yourself.

If you write entirely for yourself, you risk becoming incomprehensible. If you write entirely for your audience, you risk becoming generic.

“Write for yourself” is only useful advice because it reminds us that writing requires preferences; you have to find something interesting before anyone else can.

But, I could spend the next paragraph explaining an inside joke between my friends. It would be extremely personal, completely sincere, and almost entirely useless to you. So I make the choice not to. That decision does not make the writing less authentic. It makes it clear and communicative.

It seems to me that writing actually requires a constant negotiation between what interests you and what will mean something to somebody else.

It would be so much easier if there were a universal formula.

Somewhere, a writer was struggling to begin, so they learned to write every day. Somewhere else, a writer was clinging to the wrong sentence, so they learned to kill their darlings. Somewhere else, a writer was over-explaining everything, so they learned to show instead of tell.

Then they succeeded. And like most successful people, they eventually developed a theory about why. 

The rest of us inherited the medicine without the diagnosis.

I spent years searching for the perfect method, only to discover that most of the work involves understanding myself.

If there is a universal rule, I suspect it’s to pay attention. Pay attention to what is and isn’t working. Pay attention to the habits helping you and the ones getting in the way. Pay attention to yourself.

Then ignore anyone who tells you they know exactly how writing works. 

Including me.

I don’t remember any pre-calculus, but I remember every mildly awkward sentence I said in 2022.

Not the important conversations, either. I remember the joke that landed slightly wrong at a birthday dinner. The strangely aggressive “Are we done?” I said to a professor after a meeting. The exact moment I told someone “miss you” before hanging up, despite several compelling indicators that they did not, in fact, miss me back. I remember everything about these moments, down to what I was wearing, where I was sitting, and the spiral that followed soon after.

A few years ago, during my first performance review as a Resident Assistant, my supervisors told me my greatest strength was self-awareness.

I remember thinking: That’s a kind way to say “crippling anxiety.“

Self-awareness is one of those traits everyone treats as unquestionably virtuous. It belongs to the same category as patience, humility, and returning your shopping cart to the designated area instead of leaving it diagonally across two parking spaces. Therapists recommend it, employers praise it, and friends bask it in because self-aware people are usually sensitive to others’ feelings.

Self-aware people often make everyone around them more comfortable largely because they are never fully comfortable themselves.

They are, generally speaking, easier to argue with because part of them is already worried you might be right, and they care how they’re perceived by everyone at the end of the debate—not just by their own side. Self-aware people don’t want to be right; they want to have been fair, appropriately toned, emotionally intelligent, and if wrong, ideally the kind of wrong people later describe as “coming from a good place.”

Writers are especially vulnerable to this kind of thinking.

Once you’ve spent enough time staring at sentences until they become either brilliant or humiliating—usually humiliating—you start noticing things most people move past: shifts in tone, awkward pauses, accidental implications, and the difference between what someone says, what they mean, and what they were trying not to say. 

Because that’s fundamentally what writing is: paying attention to the things most people move through too quickly to notice. It’s thinking through a conversation word by word, then sentence by sentence, then silence by silence, ruminating on rhythm, subtext, contradiction—any evidence of something sitting just underneath the surface.

A conversation happens in real time, then again on the walk home, then again in analysis, then again while retelling it to someone else. By the fourth replay, you’re no longer remembering the interaction itself so much as your interpretation of it—the tightened, edited cut your brain pieced together afterward. Cleaner, more coherent, and usually far less forgiving than the original moment ever was.

You become aware of your own voice in the same way you become aware of breathing: Once you notice it, you immediately start doing it worse. You’ll be halfway through telling a story at dinner with your closest friends, who have always loved you dearly, and suddenly think: 

Am I talking too much?

Why did I use that word specifically?

Did I interrupt them or was that a socially acceptable overlap? 

After the last one, you’ll spend the next week trying to seem less like a person who interrupts people—by contributing exactly 43% less. Meanwhile everyone else gets home, takes off their shoes, and turns on the TV. 

Writers, unfortunately, rarely experience anything only once. Sometimes, being a writer feels indistinguishable from recreational overthinking. The problem is that eventually this habit extends beyond the page.

It’s not difficult to apply the same scrutiny you direct toward yourself to your writing.

I’ve always loved writing because it rewards the exact habits that make living exhausting. Spending forty minutes mentally reassembling a conversation sounds unhealthy right up until you turn it into an essay, and dissecting every moment of your life becomes strangely respectable once it can be described as “a strong, specific voice.” The same compulsions that make living feel crowded inside my own head suddenly acquire value the moment they produce a paragraph.

That’s the weird thing about being “good” at self-reflection. People assume it leads to clarity, but often it just leads to better recognized insecurities. You become incredibly skilled at identifying your flaws while remaining strangely incapable of leaving them alone. 

It feels like standing outside yourself with a red pen, endlessly revising a draft no one else noticed needed editing—because maybe it didn’t. As a Resident Assistant, I said the right things at staff meetings, acted conscientiously toward my residents, and tried hard to make people around me feel respected. Yet at that point in my life, I genuinely could not tell the difference between self-awareness and self-hatred. All I could ever think about was when I had said the wrong thing.

That first official performance review arrived after years of unauthorized ones that happened alone in the shower. My internal monologue had the production quality of a prestige documentary, though my inner voice lacked the soothing timbre of David Attenborough; you’ve never heard a narrator so hostile toward the subject.

Self-awareness probably has less to do with constant reflection and more to do with knowing when to stop. Knowing when your guilt is self-indulgent. Knowing when you’ve learned the lesson and are now just pressing on the bruise.

Because contrary to what I used to believe, not everyone is thinking about you. 

Sometimes you do something embarrassing. Sometimes you misunderstand someone. Sometimes you’re selfish, defensive, insecure, dramatic, awkward, loud, passive aggressive, or wrong.

Congratulations on your humanity.

Healthy writing requires knowing when to stop editing before every sentence dies under the weight of its own self-consciousness. You can revise something so many times that all the life drains out of it.

People aren’t that different.

Some of my favorite writing happens at the edges of the day.

The world gets quieter. Fewer notifications arrive. Nobody expects an immediate response. There is something peaceful about working while the rest of the world appears to have collectively agreed to stop talking for a few hours. In a strange way, writing early in the morning and writing late at night share a lot in common. Both happen before the demands start or after they’ve ended. Both offer a rare feeling of uninterrupted attention.

But there is one crucial difference: Midnight Ember and Morning Ember are two completely different people.

I trust Morning Ember. Morning Ember drinks water (albeit after a comically large cup of coffee), reads instructions before beginning assignments, and generally makes decisions supported by evidence.

Midnight Ember, meanwhile, has a very different set of strengths.

Her primary qualification is that she is still awake. Beyond that, she has a laptop, feels strongly about things, and specializes in perseverance under the most dire of circumstances. She can continue working long after success and stubbornness become indistinguishable.

I appreciate Midnight Ember’s effort. I admire her commitment. But I absolutely do not trust her unsupervised.

What makes Midnight Ember particularly dangerous is that she has never successfully completed a project in her life, yet she remains extraordinarily confident in her ability to manage them. Morning Ember always has to deal with the consequences. Their relationship has deteriorated considerably over the years.

I’ve come to suspect that Morning Ember and Midnight Ember are merely the most visible expression of a much larger disagreement; they are two competing instincts that accompany every writing project from beginning to end.

Writing creates a strange conflict of interest, as the writer and editor often occupy the same body. The problem is that both jobs demand opposite things. One requires commitment; the other requires skepticism.

Unfortunately, after spending three hours wrestling with a paragraph, it becomes difficult to tell whether you’ve improved it or just grown fond of it. Somewhere around the twentieth reread, every sentence begins to earn the benefit of the doubt. And when you’ve spent three hours fighting for a paragraph, of course you think it’s important. You’ve probably invested more time in it than anything else that day.

The opposite happens too. A writer can become just as invested in cutting a paragraph as keeping one. More than once, Morning Ember has opened a document to discover that Midnight Ember deleted a paragraph for being “redundant,” only for Morning Ember to spend twenty minutes writing the exact same paragraph again.

The thing is, Midnight Ember isn’t wrong about everything.

Some of my favorite ideas arrive after midnight. Some of my best drafts begin there. Midnight Ember is willing to chase ideas that Morning Ember would dismiss immediately. She is reckless, but creativity occasionally benefits from recklessness.

The problem is when either insists on being both writer and editor.

Those are different jobs.

Creating something requires a willingness to be wrong. You have to follow bad ideas, write clumsy sentences, and occasionally convince yourself that the history of human attention can be explained entirely through a TikTok of someone chugging a BuzzBall (which, if my thesis advisor is reading this, was less ridiculous in context).

Editing requires the opposite mindset. It demands distance, restraint, and the willingness to delete things you spent an hour writing—but only when distance and restraint suggest you should.

This is one of the biggest lessons I have learned from editing other people’s work. As an editor, I encounter the finished product rather than the struggle that created it. I don’t know which sentence took five minutes and which one took five hours. I don’t know which paragraph consumed an entire evening or which idea survived six drafts. All I see is the page.

That separation is incredibly useful.

The more editing I’ve done, the more I’ve realized that editing your own work often relies on pretending, however briefly, that the work belongs to someone else. That’s what Morning Ember accidentally provides.

(This may explain why every writer eventually tries to trick someone else into reading their work. Not because they are incapable of editing it themselves, but because another person possesses a superpower they don’t: They haven’t seen it before.)

The writer and editor may share a body, but they should not share a shift.

I usually do my best writing when I’m not simultaneously trying to evaluate it. That’s easier said than done, of course. The editor is an enthusiastic backseat driver. Halfway through a draft, she’ll start pointing out repetitive phrasing, awkward transitions, and inconsistencies in curly and smart quotation marks. Gee, thanks.

These observations aren’t unhelpful, they’re just not the emergency she believes them to be. A first draft is a poor environment for judgment because there is rarely enough context for the judgment to be useful.

More than once, I’ve returned to a document convinced I would need to rewrite an entire section, only to discover that it was the strongest in my paper. Other times, a paragraph that seemed pointless while I was writing it turned out to be the missing piece that connected everything else. Many writing problems become easier to solve once there is more writing around them. You can’t always tell what belongs until you’ve finished building the thing it’s supposed to belong to.

And many of the paragraphs I eventually cut are the same paragraphs that allowed me to discover the ones I keep.

So in a way, I appreciate the conflict between the writer and editor. For years, I thought the goal was to make them agree—to become the kind of writer who always knew exactly what to say and exactly how to say it.

Now I’m not so sure. In fact, I suspect the conflict is a good sign. The moment a writer becomes completely satisfied with every sentence they produce is probably the moment they stop improving. The editor exists because the writer is imperfect. The writer exists because the editor is a perfectionist, and someone has to be willing to write the bad first draft.

Rather than trying to make Morning Ember and Midnight Ember agree, I settle for keeping them from talking over each other.

The facilitation of interpretive accessibility through the optimization of sentence-level communicative practices remains a significant challenge within contemporary academic discourse.

Or, to put it another way: Academic writing is often hard to read.

You might have noticed that the first option feels less like reading and more like someone slowly tightening a ratchet strap around your torso.

That is because nearly every important word in it is a noun:

• facilitation
• accessibility
• optimization
• practices
• challenge
• discourse

The main action in that first sentence is “remains.” Besides remaining, the only thing the reader really experiences is things.

The sentence does not move forward so much as accumulate mass. Nothing happens, nothing moves, and no person acts upon anything. The prose just keeps unloading additional conceptual objects into the reader’s arms until they topple over. 

Be honest… Did you actually try to parse that opening sentence before moving on? I wouldn’t. I’d be on the hunt for context clues immediately.

Consider this sentence:

“The analysis of gender representation in film contributed to the development of a broader understanding of cinematic characterization.”

Nothing about the sentence is technically incorrect, but consider how difficult it is to picture what actually happened. Somewhere inside this sentence, buried six feet under analyses, representations, films, developments, understandings, and characterizations, a person watched a movie.

Perhaps we might have gathered that had they written:

“By analyzing gender representation in film, researchers developed new interpretations of characterization.”

Or maybe even:

“Researchers analyzed how films portray gender.”

Notice how those sentences contain a character. This is rare in academic writing, which is often written by ghosts.

I suppose somewhere along the line, students became convinced that verbs were informal. This probably happened around the time we outlawed the first-person pronoun, and everything stopped being used and started undergoing utilization. 

This tendency toward abstraction has many forms, but one of the worst offenders is nominalization: turning verbs into nouns.

• “We decided” becomes “the decision-making process.”
• “We compared the results” becomes “a comparison of the results was conducted.”
• “We investigated the problem” becomes “an investigative inquiry into the problematic circumstance was conducted.”

(If you think that last one is exaggerated, spend a few hours reading student papers.)

Verbs generate momentum because they move. One thing acts upon another, and the reader experiences thought unfolding through sequence, causality, and change. Nominalization interrupts that movement by freezing actions into objects.

Verbs move. Nouns sit there. 

Once the verb disappears, the sentence starts compensating for the loss. So more words enter the sentence, but less arrives in the reader’s mind.

This is why overly nominalized prose feels slow even when the individual words are familiar. The reader must continuously translate concepts back into actions before meaning fully forms. 

“The dog chased the ball” produces an immediate mental image.

“The chase of the ball by the dog” does not.

Many students learn early that clarity sounds less academic than complexity, even when the complex sentence communicates less. In some academic environments, accessibility or enjoyability is treated almost like a loss of prestige.

I understand the temptation because I fell for it myself. During my early years of college, many of the academic readings I encountered took significant effort to dissect, so I concluded that difficulty was simply a feature of serious writing. If the experts wrote this way, surely I was supposed to as well.

What I didn’t realize was that not every academic is equally interested in being read. A brilliant researcher can still write a miserable sentence.

But imitation only explains part of it.

For me, the deeper issue was insecurity. I quickly learned that sounding intelligent is often safer than being understood immediately. A clear sentence exposes you.

“Researchers analyzed how films portray gender.”

There it is. A reader can instantly decide whether the idea is persuasive, obvious, shallow, interesting, incomplete, or wrong.

Then compare that to:

“The analysis of gender representation in film contributed to the development of a broader understanding of cinematic characterization.”

Now the claim exists behind several layers of nominal fog. The sentence sounds formal before it becomes intelligible. Sometimes that is the point.

Unfortunately, this strategy often undermines the very thing academic writing is supposed to accomplish: communicating ideas.

Good prose does not simplify thought. It clarifies it. In fact, clarity becomes more important as ideas become more complex. The harder the concept, the less additional friction the sentence can afford. 

When writers allow people to perform actions, readers gain something to follow. The subject provides continuity. As a paragraph unfolds, the reader only has to keep asking a simple question: What is this person, group, or thing doing now?

That question is surprisingly powerful because it gives the paragraph a center of gravity. Each sentence feels connected to the last, not because the ideas are merely related, but because the reader can track a consistent subject through them. When the reader can easily identify who is doing what, they are free to focus on the more interesting question: Why does it matter?

So how do you de-nominalize a sentence?

Start by locating the corpse of the verb. Somewhere inside “evaluation” is “evaluate.” Inside “analysis” is “analyze.” Inside “discussion” is “discuss.”

Then let somebody perform it. Sentences usually become clearer once somebody is allowed to do something. So when “a discussion of the results was conducted,” ask yourself who is actually discussing the results. Perhaps a group. The group discussed the results.

Okay, reader, I get it. You’re probably fully capable of deciphering these nominalized sentences.

But let me ask you something: Do you actually want to? Or would you rather your writing sound alive? Because liveliness is not exclusive to creative writing. When prose sounds alive, ideas become easier to follow.

Complex concepts already ask a lot of the reader.

Your prose should help carry the weight, not add to it.

We tend to imagine writing begins with inspiration.

A writer has a brilliant idea while on a train, staring thoughtfully out a rain-speckled window. They rush to their keyboard, fingers fly across the keys, and three hours later, they emerge with something spectacular.

This is an excellent system, provided you’re limited to a typewriter or a clay tablet.

For the rest of us, writing is a much messier process.

In fact, most writers I know are mostly just sitting there… and not dramatically either. No rainstorm,  no cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling while they whisper through their fingertips onto the page. Just a person in sweatpants making frustrated noises at a laptop. Sometimes the noises become words, and sometimes they become “GRRRR” typed directly into the document itself.

This experience is most often referred to as writer’s block.

Inspiration.

A lot of writer’s block is not actually a lack of ideas. It’s wanting to know exactly what you’re going to say before you say it.

Unfortunately, writing doesn’t always work that way, which is inconvenient because it means the process works in the exact opposite order from how we’d prefer. We want certainty first and effort second. Writing generally demands the reverse.

Inspiration is like an unreliable coworker. If you wait for it to show up before getting started, nothing gets done. So the next time you’re waiting for inspiration, lower the bar aggressively. Become willing to write garbage—because it’s impossible to revise a blank page. Like an unreliable coworker, inspiration tends to wander in eventually and take credit for the entire project.

The first draft is often less a demonstration of what you know than a process for finding out.

Polish, or the Lack Thereof.

Another source of writer’s block is the belief that a piece should feel finished after one sitting. This expectation survives despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. No one lays a foundation, looks at it, and says, “Well… guess that’s all the house we’re getting.”

Every writer knows what happens when they revisit yesterday’s work: Yesterday’s masterpiece has somehow become today’s rough draft. 

This happens because writing rarely has one right answer, and you’ve spent the last twenty-four hours becoming a slightly different person with slightly different opinions. You might as well allow the process to be a process instead of fighting for something to be polished before it’s ready.

Try writing as if nobody will ever read it, which works because nobody is reading it. It’s a draft. Stretch your legs and enjoy the freedom.

Put Thought to Word.

Before the pieces are on the table, you can’t see the picture.

Try drafting your ideas with as few—or as many—words as come to mind. Don’t worry about grammar, punctuation, organization, or whether any of it sounds intelligent. Your only job is to keep up with your own thoughts. Dump everything onto the page as quickly as possible, with only enough coherence that you can understand yourself.

It will probably be messy. It’s for the best.

Many writers try to organize ideas before they’ve fully articulated them, but it’s a mistake to try to assemble the puzzle while half the pieces are still in the box. Get them onto the table first, then go back and figure out where they belong. You’ll have a much easier time choosing sentence structures, transitions, and the order of ideas once you can actually see—and remember—what you’re trying to say.

Leave It Behind.

Writer’s block won’t always leave you alone after the beginning stages. Sometimes it appears halfway through a single sen–

Never mind.

You know the feeling. You’ve rewritten the same line six times and somehow managed to create six entirely new problems. At this point, many writers might end that sentence with the aforementioned “GRRRR.”

I have a different system. If a sentence is terrible and I can’t figure out how to fix it, I make it bold. That’s it. The sentence remains terrible, but now it’s a future problem. Future Ember is remarkably talented; I leave her all kinds of disasters to solve.

Present Ember, meanwhile, gets to keep writing.

Just Write Something.

At the risk of upsetting every movie montage ever filmed, writing is usually not a lightning strike. It’s an accumulation of small discoveries, wrong turns, revisions, and occasional moments of competence.

Writer’s block will reinvent itself throughout the writing process. At the beginning it sounds like, “I don’t know what to write.” Later it becomes, “This isn’t good enough yet.” Eventually it turns into, “I can’t move on until this sentence works.”

Writer’s block often feels like an inability to move forward. More often, it’s an unwillingness to move forward imperfectly. Perfectionism is persuasive because it sounds responsible. But honestly? It’s just a more sophisticated form of procrastination.

The strange thing about writer’s block is that it often disappears the moment there is something to work on; the lightning strike we imagine at the beginning often turns out to be a reward for getting started.

You can edit a draft. You can improve a draft. You can even bold a draft and abandon it for Future Ember. 

(Future Ember, if you’re reading this, good luck.) 

But first, you have to write one.