Write While True

I think one sentence from David Lambuth really sums up what I want to say about paragraphs. Here it is. There is no absolute rule for paragraphing. Your own feeling must be your guide. The Golden Book on Writing [amazon affiliate link] by David Lambuth The Elements of Style [amazon affiliate link] by Strunk & White Transcript

I’m going to use these three books again for today’s topic, which is the order of words in a sentence. I love that these books tackle mundane topics, things that seem innate, but aren’t. I mean, we can order words into something grammatical without much thought. Even though a ten-sentence word has ten factorial possible orderings, we can easily find the handful that are legal English. The Golden B...

Every book on writing tells you to avoid adverbs (and even adjectives). I find that hard to do in first drafts, but I do try to remove them in edits. You can tell that I haven’t done enough editing if you see that I “really like” something or that a new programming language is “pretty good”. Season 3 Write While True Episode 28: Complex Sentences Write While True Epis...

Last week, I spoke about something very fundamental—how to write complex sentences, and I’m going to continue along in that theme for what I’m now calling season three, drawing lessons from some of what I consider the greatest books about writing, and picking out ideas related to using words, sentences, and paragraphs. These are things that I’ve found that I need to work on, and...

I like to sketch, mostly with pencil and charcoal on paper. One of the first things I needed to learn was how my drawing tools and the paper interacted. What kind of mark did each level of pencil hardness make, and how was that different from charcoal? What kind of paper worked best? I did various exercises that helped me understand my own tools.  I’ve been thinking a lot about this and tryin...

This is the fourth and final episode in a series I’m doing about the book Art & Fear [amazon affiliate link] by David Bayles and Ted Orland. In this, the final episode of the series, I’m going to tell you what they think you need to be in order to be an artist. Art & Fear [amazon affiliate link] by Bayles and Orland Write While True Episode 24: Thousands of Variations (part 1)...

I decided to do a four-part series on the lessons I learned from Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. This week, in part three, I want to talk about a quote about what art means to the maker. Art & Fear [amazon affiliate link] Write While True Episode 24: Thousands of Variations (part 1) Write While True Episode 25: Stopping vs. Quitting (part 2) Transcript

I reread the book Art and Fear by Bayles and Orland and they had so many ideas for how to get people to make art, that it worked for me to start my blog going again, and then ultimately restarting this podcast. For part two of this four part series on Art and Fear , I’m going to share the what they said that inspired me to not quit. Here’s the quote. Quitting is fundamentally different...

One of the things that got me back to podcasting after a two year break was rereading Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. This time, while I was reading it, I kept a lot of notes and found four themes that resonated with me and helped me get going again. The first theme is very practical. It’s what they think is the secret to being prolific. For the past two months I have been app...

We just passed the second anniversary of the break that I didn’t come back from right away. I know exactly what was going on. I had a lot of travel to visit family and for work and it was just hard to find the time to plan and record podcasts. Well, since it’s exactly two years later. It’s summer again, and I want to take another break. But this time I have a plan to take a break...

When I was done with a journal, I’d put it on the shelf with others. I do a good job of making sure to transfer anything important to a real tracking system at the end of the day, so there wasn’t much in the journal that I thought would be useful. At some point, though, I picked up an old journal, it was probably a few years old at that point, and just flipped through it. As expected, it was mostl...

I’ve been using a paper journal for years. Even when I worked on big teams, I still kept a separate journal with my personal daily tasks and schedule. For years, I just used a single journal for everything. I’d just go through it and then start another one when I hit the last page. Any kind of paper capture that I needed to do was in that one journal. A couple of years ago I started sp...

When I was 13, my mom got me an electric typewriter for Christmas. She was a secretary, and she taught me how to touch type, and she wanted me to have something to practice on. But unfortunately, when I opened it up, it didn’t work. Write While True Episode 1: Training to Unblock Yourself Write While True Episode 3: First Drafts Write While True Episode 19: Prompt Your Morning Pages I Didn’t...

If you are just coming to this podcast on this episode, I have to tell you that I talk about Morning Pages a lot. It was the subject of Episode 1 . Listen to that for the full description of what they are or read the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron [amazon affiliate link] , which is where I was introduced to the idea. The main thing to know is that I start each morning by writing thre...

I thought it would be a good idea to re-listen to all of my podcasts from season one. Each of them is only about 10 minutes and there are only 15 episodes, so it doesn’t take too long. This had two effects. First I realized they weren’t as bad as I thought, which made me feel better about restarting. The second thing is that I started to hear the advice almost as if it was coming from...

I thought about things that were going well, where I had a lot of output, like my programming projects. One thing I realized that helps a lot is that I am proud of that work. Doing it is a self-esteem builder, and I have a lot of confidence that I can meet my own standards. I’ve been programming for a long time, so this isn’t much of a surprise. All during that time I challenged myself...

I did season one of this podcast a couple of years ago. I did 15 episodes. They were about some of the basics of building up a writing habit, and then I stopped. In this season, I am going to explore how to restart projects in the context of restarting this one. I want to talk about one of the lessons I’ve learned. Transcript

I made this podcast, but I wanted to self-host, so I learned how to do that with s3 and wrote my own way to get analytics. So, Podcasting leads to programming. And then I wrote up a blog about that program (so it led back to writing) and now I am telling you about it on this podcast. Round and round it goes. The more times I go around the circle, the easier it becomes to write or podcast or progra...

Last week I encouraged you to collect general knowledge. Viking trade routes, anime, Rothko paintings, architecture, typography, bluegrass standards -- where ever your interests lead you. For these kinds of things, it may be hard to write a note though. You could certainly write down something, but it's unlikely that you'll develop a few paragraphs of a coherent thought about lots of random things...

New ideas are combinations of old ones.

In the past, when I set goals to write more frequently, I was always stopped by not having ideas ready for what to write about. Or when I got one, I didn't have a systematic way of collecting them. I would sit down to write, but getting started on a new piece was too difficult. My ONE thing is make it so that when I sit down to write I have a checklist to work from.

I know that a lot of my episodes are variations on the theme of quantity. In episode one, I asked you to write morning pages every day. In episode 4, I asked you to make a schedule where you write multiple days a week. I've talked about the importance of producing many first drafts. In episode 8, I said you should lower your bar and just last week I shared my personal “why”, which is all about pla...

The exercise this week is to think about your "why"? I don't think it's wrong to write for money or fame, but if you're an amateur like me, I'd find something easier to attain.

I don't use a lot of social media, but if I don't plan my time intentionally, I'll find myself watching a lot of YouTube. It's not that I think that my life should be 100% dedicated to making new things or in solitary contemplation. But, there are times when I notice that level of output isn't where I want it to be, and so I take a good look at how I am spending my time.

This episode is about lowering the bar, and I'm tempted to just say go do it and sign off. That would be the ultimate lowering the bar for this podcast. I won't do that, but I am going to keep the bar on this episode pretty low. And, you're probably thinking -- Lou, I thought the bar for Write While True episodes was pretty low already.