16 Writing Tips from Inkhaven
My time at Inkhaven is nearly at an end. It’s been amazing, especially getting to know some of my blogging heroes. Hopefully I’ve been helpful to some of the up-and-coming writers. If not, here’s a Hail Mary: the list of tips I’ve collected. I’ve sorted them by decreasing popularity so that if you start reading them and get to one that’s dumb, you can just stop there and assume you haven’t missed anything better.
Stop worrying and structure all writing as a list. A classic by Dynomight, who led a workshop on this principle at Inkhaven.
Rereading what you wrote a week or a month later is a bit like having a copyeditor (assuming you don’t have a copyeditor).
Have friends read drafts. You’ll be surprised how much illusion of transparency you suffer from. (Like how I almost said “editor” in the previous tip without noticing the ambiguity between a human editor and a text editor.) This is also Steven Pinker’s favorite writing tip. He calls the curse of knowledge the source of bad writing. See also items 6 and 7 in my list of reasons to rearticulate insights in your own words.
Write for a specific person. When you don’t there’s a constant mental headwind of choices about what terms to explain or how much detail is needed.
Use “Hemingway Mode” where your text editor doesn’t let you delete anything. More generally, do writing and editing separately. See also Dynomight’s elegant implementation of the Most Dangerous Writing App. (Thanks to Lucie Philippon for convincing me to take this one more seriously.)
Relatedly, go for quantity over quality, as in the maybe-apocryphal story of the professor who graded half the class on quantity and the other half on quality, with the punchline that the former produced higher quality work, just from the practice.
Active verbs strengthen sentences. (Fun related rabbit hole: E-Prime.)
Show, don’t tell. Nix most adjectives and amplifying adverbs like “very” and “really”.
When editing, constantly ask yourself for each word if the prose would be any worse without it. In the previous sentence, “constantly” and “any” could be on the chopping block. But don’t go overboard; flow matters too.
Consistency is key, for more reasons than you’d think, for both you and your readers.
Use AI but never let it put any words in your mouth. Quote it explicitly if it’s so good you can’t say it better yourself. See last week’s AGI Friday for more tips on AI writing assistance.
The way to resolve confusing comma questions and many questions of typography is by ear. Whatever makes it work best when read aloud. See also the last item in my list of wrong and dumb grammar rules.
Constrained writing is powerful. At the very least use the out-loud-to-your-friend constraint.
Collect drafts and ideas and do backlog freshening to them.
Prefer to commit to the action (time spent) over the outcome (words written) — as long as you have a way to stay totally focused on writing during that time.
3. I can probably get my sister or my spouse to read my drafts, but it might take up to 24 hours to get to posting that way. If I want to implement this habit during my DIY Inkhaven, I should write two today, post one, and get the other read by the human reviewer. From then on, I’ll stay one post ahead. So if someone wants to implement this habit, and they’re posting daily, they should implement it along with #15.