🖊️ Greatest Writing Wisdom Series

05 Jul, 2025

Writing is an act of faith,
not a trick of grammar.
-E.B. White

It starts with a single letter, a curve of ink on a blank page. Then another, and another, until they catch fire and become a word. These words find each other in the dark, link arms and form sentences. And then, by some ancient and impossible magic, these sentences build a world.

Writing is a miracle. It is also a menace. It's the art form that gives us the power to conjure realities from thin air, and then turns around and humbles us with the starkness of a blinking cursor. It promises rules only to reveal they are merely suggestions, whispers in a language of infinite subjectivity, perspective, and incandescent light. It's a wonder any of us survive it, let alone fall in love with it. Of all the ways to build a life, writing is the one most likely to make you feel immortal one day and strangle you in your sleep the next.

This magnificent, maddening paradox is why I started this quest. For years, I've collected and gathered the deepest, sharpest writing wisdom I could find. I've scoured writing manuals and memoirs, interviews and essays, classroom syllabi and drunken barstool confessions. I've collected the field notes of those who mastered the craft and honored it by sharing what they learned.

I've read canon: Dillard's The Writing Life, Lamott's Bird by Bird, Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, McPhee's Draft No. 4, Le Guin's Steering the Craft, Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing, Gornick's The Situation and the Story.

I've devoured all of Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews — arguably the richest trove of writing wisdom ever mined, straight from the mouths of Didion and Baldwin, Márquez and Hemingway. I've scribbled dissents in the margins of Dreyer and Prose. I've dog-eared Colum McCann's Letters to a Young Writer until its spine gave out.

Greatest Writing Wisdom: Collected Essays

This series is a curated treasury of the greatest writing wisdom I’ve ever come across. Each post explores a distinct facet of the writing craft. Each entry is shaped by a singular lens, theme, work, or voice.

Some editions borrow from the masters—Didion, Dillard, Tolstoy, Dickens, Proust, Wallace, Adichie. Others draw from beloved books and the enduring canon of “writing on writing.” Still others arise from the raw, daily experience of doing the work and the hard-won truths that only show up on the page.

Here you'll find principles, contradictions, and hard-won truths on everything from brevity and grammar to inspiration, discipline, and doubt. Some of it is sharp and declarative. Some of it is poetic and philosophical. All of it, together, says something essential about the strange, maddening, life-altering act of trying to write something worth reading. Some advice you'll want to tattoo on your forearm. Some you'll throw away. That's how this works.

The real treasure, the living heart of this project, is in the Writing Wisdom NotebookLM. It's where I've compiled everything — thousands of pieces of writing advice from hundreds of sources spanning centuries — into a single, freely shared resource. Dive in. Ask it questions. Let it be the voice that calls you back to the page when you've lost the thread.

#compilations #wisdom #writing