#anyways im going to go look at a blank document for half an hour trying to coax my brain into wording

[microwave-core]

what if you wanted to write but ended up falling flat on your face and it was bad enough to where, for a brief moment while laying in semi-shock on the ground, you thought you broke your glasses and now your head hurts but you don't want to take anything because you have to chew ibuprofen man that would be fucked up

[taexual]

HOLIC - 36 | jb x reader

pairing: Im Jaebum x Reader

genre: enemies to lovers au | roommate au

warnings: fluff + some suggestive themes

words: 3.7k

disclaimer: i do not own the gif, please let me know if it belongs to you, so i can give proper credit

           prev / next

It looked like most rooms at the motel were vacant when you arrived and the middle-aged clerk seemed almost excited to see you – even though it was obvious what you and Jaebum had gotten up to. Not even the remaining hour drive to the motel could erase the undeniable atmosphere of sex around the two of you; and it wasn’t like you were trying to hide it anyway, with Jaebum’s hand settling down on your waist as soon as you two stepped out of the car.

The lady at the front desk, after greeting you in an overly enthusiastic way, informed you that all rooms of the motel were designed the same way, so you could pick whichever one you wanted. All of them included a bathroom, a TV set, a mini-fridge, and two single beds. She sounded apologetic when she said that last part as if you’d turn around and leave, not even stopping to consider sleeping in separate beds.

“It’s alright, we know,” Jaebum said. “We’d called before to get a room reservation but were told not to worry about it.”

“That’s right, we don’t get many guests. It’s a small town,” the clerk told him, fishing a key off the hook on the wall next to her. “How many nights will you be staying with us?”

“Just this one,” he replied, releasing your waist when the lady passed him a form to sign. “We’ll be gone tomorrow.”

She nodded knowingly – although you weren’t sure what was there to know; but, then again, you and Jaebum probably weren’t the first couple that showed up here out of the blue, stayed for one night, and then disappeared in the morning – and then, after making sure your stay was documented and paid for, she finally passed you two the key to your room.

“Have a good night!” she said, her eyes shimmering in a way that suggested she knew you two would.

After thanking her and saying a quick goodbye, you and Jaebum retreated to the room. Contrary to what you’d expected from a motel that not a lot of people frequented, the room wasn’t awful at all. Just like advertised, it had two single beds separated by something that looked like a broken nightstand, a TV set – even if it must have been one of the few leftover relics from the early 90s in this room – a mini-fridge that buzzed so loudly, you thought you’d stumbled upon someone snoring when you’d first entered, and a tiny bathroom. The sight of the latter excited you the most.

“Will you be alright here?” you asked, throwing your phone on the bed closer to the bathroom, never having enjoyed sleeping next to a window – especially not when you were on the first floor – and turning to look at the only other person in the room. “I’m dying to take a shower.”

“Oh. Well, if you’re so concerned about my entertainment,” Jaebum, initially surprised that you were worried about leaving him alone for however long it’d take for you to finish your shower, was now smirking as he finished, “then you can just invite me to come with you.”

You gave him a blank look. “I have an important meeting tomorrow and it would certainly help if my legs could actually work.”

He laughed at that – obviously, taking it as a compliment – and then tried again, “I can be gentle.”

“Of all the things you’ve told me since we’ve met,” you replied, “that is the one I find the hardest to believe.”

“I can prove it.”

“Hmm,” you shook your head, merely blinking and then noticing that Jaebum had taken a step closer to you, his grinning face was now centimeters away from yours. “I’ll keep that in mind. Not tonight, though.”

He shrugged his shoulders, stepping away from you and plopping down on the bed next to the window with a deep sigh. “Fine. Your loss. Leave me here, bored and completely alone.”

His exaggerated dramaticism made you snicker. “There’s a TV. Knock yourself out.”

“I can turn your hot water off for more entertainment,” he teased.

“I know you can,” you said. “But I’m not playing games anymore. I’m strict now – you do that, I’ll kill you.”

“You’ll kill me anyway, one way or another,” he waved his hand dismissively. “I might as well have fun while I wait for you to do that.”

You shook your head again, throwing your shoes off by the door and finally heading for the bathroom. After inspecting it – the shower seemed decent enough and the drain didn’t look like it was going to swallow you whole as soon as you stepped into the booth, either – and then turning around to face the room one last time.

“Yell if you need me,” you told Jaebum.

“I need you!” he yelled immediately, earning a surprised – but amused nevertheless – look from you as you stopped halfway out of the bathroom.

“You’re in an unusually great mood,” you observed, smiling to yourself when you realized that this – happy – was your favorite version of him. “Stay that way until I come back.”

When you got out of the shower less than twenty minutes later, however, Jaebum was nearly asleep. Traces of his smile from before still lingered on his face, but his soft breaths indicated that, although still obviously happy, he was now more exhausted than anything else. You didn’t blame him. He’d endured a full day of work and then drove for more than six hours for you.

Smiling appreciatively, you hovered over his sleeping frame, considering leaning down and wiping the stray strands of hair from his forehead but not risking it in case that would wake him up. A second later, you jumped back because he suddenly opened his eyes anyway.

“You’re awake,” you pointed out the obvious. “I thought you’d fallen asleep.”

“No,” he replied in a husky voice and then yawned right after. “I need to shower, too.”

“Sorry,” you bit your lip. “You can go ahead.”

With a tired blink of his eyes, he sat up and reached for his phone – that he’d already placed on the nightstand in-between the two beds – and sighed after checking the time. Aware of his exhaustion, you offered him a smile.

“Need help with your shower?” you asked, earning a small chuckle from him.

“It’s alright. You should go to sleep,” he told you, climbing off the bed and stretching. “Busy day tomorrow.”

You nodded, inhaling deeply. For the majority of the day today, your mind was occupied with the trip here, but now that you’d actually made it into town, the nerves about the interview that awaited you tomorrow have started to poke at your mind, replacing the previous anxiety with slightly more prominent one. While the trip over here was stressful, it was still something that you could, more or less, plan out. The interview tomorrow, on the other hand, was completely out of your control.

“Nervous?” Jaebum asked, noticing the change in your expression. But he continued before you could reply, “don’t be. They will love you.”

“Normally, I’d say no and let my insecurities get the best of me,” you admitted, “but, God, I really hope you’re right.”

He smiled hearing this. “I am. You’ll see.”

“I probably won’t be able to sleep the whole night tonight, to be honest.”

“Well, if that’s the case,” Jaebum said, sitting down on the edge of his bed as you sat down on yours, “then wait until I come back from my shower and I can tell you a bedtime story. Something that will take your mind off of tomorrow.”

Another thing he was willing to do for you. Your stomach had suddenly clenched so hard, you could barely breathe.

“No,” you said softly. “You need to rest. You’ve already gone out of your way to—”

“I haven’t done anything you haven’t done for me,” he replied. “Although, I’m not doing this because I owe you. I’m a simple man – when I offer to do something, it’s because I genuinely want to do it.”

As your chest swelled with even more adoration, you shook your head.

“Stop being so nice to me,” you said. “Or I’ll start to think aliens had abducted you and replaced you with a very well-made copy.”

“When would they even do that?” Jaebum laughed. “I’ve been with you the whole day.”

“Well, I was just in the shower for half an hour, lots of things could have—”

Taking you completely off guard, he cut you off mid-sentence by reaching over and pressing his lips to yours in a gentle kiss. You could feel him smile into the kiss when he heard your breath hitch in surprise.

“Did that feel like me?” he asked after pulling away a moment later, his classic grin back on his face.

“Yeah,” you exhaled. “That felt like you alright.”

Chuckling again, Jaebum nodded his head in the direction of the bathroom, indicating that he was really going this time.

“Wait for me,” he reminded you, standing up.

“Hmm,” you nodded, mumbling under your breath so he wouldn’t hear (although you had a feeling that he still did), “wouldn’t be able to do anything other than that anyway.”

You lied down on your bed while you waited. The sound of the water running in the bathroom, just a few meters away from you, was soothing and, for a few quick moments, you actually thought you might end up falling asleep, after all. Just as you felt yourself sigh in content, however, the first hints of slumber fogging up your mind, you heard a gentle melody coming from the bathroom. You thought you’d imagined – or dreamt – it at first but when you opened your tired eyes, you could still hear it.

And, after sitting up and turning your head towards the bathroom door, you realized that this was Jaebum, singing in the shower.

With your heart bursting, you smiled to yourself and tried to listen better – harder – so you’d make out the words of the song but you didn’t seem to recognize the melody at all. Perhaps you just didn’t know the song or… perhaps this was an original piece that he’d created, maybe even the one he’d mentioned working on in the car on the way here.

Knowing very well that this was, technically, a form of eavesdropping, you still flipped onto your back so you could hear better but the running water inside of the bathroom made it difficult to discern the words. You couldn’t help but want desperately to ask him about this new song he was writing – if this was indeed a new song – but you knew he wouldn’t tell you much, not until he had the song all done and ready, which, based on previous experiences, could take ages.

Among the bits and pieces of separate words you’d managed to catch him sing, the only full phrase you were certain you heard was, “I want to be with you” but that was more than enough for you to understand that Jaebum had moved on from writing songs about his ex-girlfriend and was now working on a piece that was entirely different.

He’d told you once that he could never write songs about abstract concepts and instead preferred to write lyrics about his own personal experiences. He’d said he wrote the words that described the strongest emotion he was feeling at the given moment and you felt yourself smile at this memory. The sound of his voice behind the wall separating this room from the bathroom – and the words that passed his lips as he continued to sing – could have only meant that the strongest emotion he was feeling right now was not anger. Not anymore.

Holding your breath, you listened more and managed to overhear him curse silently every now and then – when he messed the melody up, most likely – which supported your hypothesis even more. Jaebum was right there, behind the wall, singing a new song that he had written himself.

And then the water stopped abruptly.

Gasping quietly, you turned to your side, your back facing the bathroom door, and closed your eyes. You’d very much prefer him thinking that you’d fallen asleep than have him catch you eavesdropping on him – in your defense, he was not being subtle about his singing at all; he had to suspect that the walls were thin.

Another moment later, you heard the door of the bathroom open. You still kept your eyes closed, your heart beating rapidly, the emotions caused by overhearing him sing still fresh in your mind.

You didn’t hear anything else for a good few minutes and debated opening your eyes so you could check what was it that he was doing without making any noise, but another second later, you were forced to find out what he was doing when he wrapped his arms – still dripping wet – around you, startling you.

“Shit, Jaebum!” you jumped up, turning your head as much as his body – now on the bed next to you, his damp skin soaking the sheets – allowed you to. “You’re wet—what are you doing?!”

“I thought you fell asleep,” he said, grinning mischievously. “So, I had to check.”

“Clearly, I’m awake!” you shot back – earning a very pleased look and a quick kiss on your cheek from him – but Jaebum was already standing up. “Did you suddenly forget how to use words?!”

“Using words is not nearly as much fun,” he said and instead of helping you find a proper response, your mind suddenly shut the function of your lungs completely off.

The sight of Jaebum standing in the dimly lit motel room in only his boxers, his hair falling on his face haphazardly as water dripped from the strands of his hair and landed on the smooth skin of his cheeks and chest, didn’t just make you do a double-take after you first laid your eyes on him. It made you battle your own mind so you could muster up enough strength to look away.

“Well,” you sat up on the bed, clearing your throat and feeling the sheets around you, “now my bed is wet because you can’t use a towel properly, either. Thank you.”

“Oh, hey look at that,” he said nonchalantly, reaching for his travel bag to find something to wear to bed, “looks like now you have to use my bed.”

You raised your eyebrows at this and shook your head, realizing that this might have been his plan all along. The previous exhaustion he had been feeling was seemingly gone now.

“You could have just told me you wanted to sleep with me instead of this,” you said, checking your shirt and shaking your head at the soaked material. “Now I’m considering sleeping here out of spite.”

“Oh, but you can’t. What if you catch a cold?” he asked, mock-concern evident on his face as soon as he pulled his shirt over his head, the material immediately clinging to the droplets of water still glistening everywhere on his skin.

“You are intolerable,” you told him matter-of-factly but Jaebum could see right through you. You weren’t nearly as annoyed as you were pretending to be.

“Come on,” he said, throwing the quilt that covered his bed to a side and patting the mattress. “Get in.”

“Not while you’re wet.”

“We can use body heat so I would dry faster.”

“I prefer sleeping in a dry bed,” you fought, resisting the pull of his eyes.

Jaebum enjoyed the challenge you were throwing at him, however, as he never ceased to smirk.

“After all that I’ve done for you,” he started and you were already able to guess where he was going to go with this, “after I’ve spent my precious time driving you over here and then making sure you really remembered this trip before you even got to the gallery,” he paused, reading your face as if to check if you understood which moment of your trip he was hinting at. You did. “And now you won’t even—”

“Okay, fine!” you stood up in a huff, took one step towards him and climbed into his bed instead, all while glaring at him as if he was making you participate in the most unpleasant activity of your life. “I knew you’d use that against me. It’s never “just a favor” with you. You always want something in return.”

He didn’t bother to deny any of that as he got into bed after you, throwing the quilt over your bodies and wrapping one arm – his skin still damp – over your body as he held you in a spooning position, nuzzling his head into your neck in an attempt to get more comfortable.

“I believe you promised me a story,” you reminded him, ignoring your suddenly accelerated heartbeat and the goosebumps that were woken up by the feeling of his breath on your neck, “and now I think you’ll have to keep talking until you’re completely dry and it no longer feels like I’m laying in a swamp.”

“In—in a swamp,” he chortled, the comparison amusing him. “Okay, alright, let me think of something to tell you. Something that would make you feel like you’re laying in a beautiful meadow full of daisies, since that’s what you’d prefer, yeah?”

“Jaebum, I’m in a very convenient position to kick you out of the bed,” you warned, bringing your foot over his shins to prove your point.

He laughed again, gently kissing your neck as an apology. “Okay, okay. Let me tell you about the time I left Mark to babysit my cats for me when we were back in college.”

And then he did. He got into explicit detail about the depth of the wounds his cats had inflicted on Mark and about how long it took him to convince Mark to come over again after that. Then, he told you about each cat he used to have individually, describing them so vividly, it was almost starting to feel like you’ve met his cats yourself.

He told you about how he had to give them away so he could get a job and stop worrying about leaving the poor animals home alone for the whole day every day. He told you about how his mom always cooked him food when he started his job at the radio station and how, whenever he opened the plastic containers she’d packed the food in, crowds of other producers would swarm to his studio to have a taste, too. He didn’t talk about his family much, focusing solely on his mother and, thus, answering the question he’d ducked out of answering in the car earlier today. He was indeed close to his mom.

By the time his throat got hoarse from all the talking, you had already turned to your other side and lied facing him instead. He had told you so much and, even though none of his stories involved the song you’d heard before, listening to his voice as he talked about his favorite moments from his life felt a little like hearing him sing and that was enough.

You weren’t sure when you began to feel drowsy and stopped focusing so much on the way his hair tickled your cheek or the way his minty breath washed off on your face every time he chuckled at the memory of the event he was telling you about.

Jaebum had succeeded in making you forget about the potentially life-changing interview you’d have to endure tomorrow because, as your mind floated between consciousness and slumber, you were thinking about something else entirely. In fact, the one thing that would not leave your mind was the realization that this didn’t feel that much different from home.

You were lying next to Jaebum here, too, his arms around you. You could hear his soft breaths, feel his heart beating against your chest, smell the soap on his skin. And when you opened your eyes, you could see that he was watching you, his gaze tender and full of vulnerability – your hand, sneaking up to rest on his chest, could have held the sharpest blade and he wouldn’t have cared. You could tell that this scared him, but not getting to hold you scared him even more.

As you thought back on all the times the two of you had wished to find yourselves in this exact position – hands and legs entangled together until one could no longer tell where your limbs ended and his began – you were even more inclined to believe that this here felt just like home. You’d spent so much time resisting the magnetic pull between your bodies until you finally gave in to it because fighting the inevitable was pointless. It just took you both some time to realize and accept this.

And now, even though your bodies were pressed close to one another, occupying only a tiny part in the corner of an otherwise enormous room – proof of how little physical life meant in comparison to all that was hidden in the universe – it felt like your souls, intertwined irreversibly, were so much bigger than this whole room. Bigger, even, than this world.

And just like Jaebum at the gas station hours before, you gasped quietly, a startling realization settling inside of your mind: his arms wrapped around you wasn’t just a reminder of an apartment somewhere far away from here. His embrace wasn’t just a mirror of all that had happened inside of his bedroom back at home.

Jaebum wasn’t just a piece of your home that you’d brought here with you.

He was your home.

“What is it?” he whispered, pulling away slightly, your gasp taking him by surprise.

“Nothing,” you replied breathlessly. “Thank you for telling me about all of that.”

“It’s okay,” he said, “are you tired?”

You nodded weakly. “I am. But I—”

“Sleep,” he told you, cutting you off before you could explain the epiphany you’d just had. “I’m here.”

He may not have heard the specific words from you – because you weren’t sure if it was possible to explain how a decidedly simple person, with nothing at all extraordinary about them, could ever discover what the true purpose of life was – but he felt them. He felt them in the tender touch of your fingertips on his chest. He felt them in your eyes when you thought he couldn’t feel you watching him. He felt them in your lips when you leaned in slowly, pressing a delicate kiss to his cheek.

Jaebum had figured out what the purpose of life was, too. It filled the otherwise empty space of the motel room, pulsating soundlessly all around you and him. It filled the vacant cavities of his chest, bringing life to his exhausted heart. It filled his mind, giving his thoughts and dreams the meaning they’d always lacked.

And, in truth, this purpose had never been hidden from him – it was right there in front of his face the whole time. He’d just been too stubborn to open his eyes and notice it.

But he saw it now. He held it in his arms, whispering a gentle “goodnight” and promising wordlessly to never let go.

     chapter directory

[writingguide003-blog]

44 Writing Hacks From Some of the Greatest Writers Who Ever Lived

New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/must-see/44-writing-hacks-from-some-of-the-greatest-writers-who-ever-lived/

44 Writing Hacks From Some of the Greatest Writers Who Ever Lived

Writing looks fun, but doing it professionally is hard. Like really hard. Why on earth am I doing this?-hard.

Which is probably why so many people want to write, yet so few actually do. But there are ways to make it easier, as many writers can tell you. Tricks that have been discovered over the centuries to help with this difficult craft.

In another industry, these tricks would be considered trade secrets. But writers are generous and they love to share (often in books about writing). They explain their own strategies for how to deal with writers block to how to make sure your computer never eats your manuscript. They give away this hard-won knowledge so that other aspiring writers wont have to struggle in the same way. Over my career, Ive tried to collect these little bits of wisdom in my commonplace book (also a writers trick which I picked up from Montaigne) and am grateful for the guidance theyve provided.

Below, Ive shared a collection of writing hacks from some amazing writers like Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Anne Lamott, and Raymond Chandler. I hope its not too presumptuous but I snuck in a few of my own too (not that I think Im anywhere near as good as them).

Anyway, heres to making this tough job a tiny bit easier!

[*] When you have an idea for an article or a bookwrite it down. Dont let it float around in your head. Thats a recipe for losing it. As Beethoven is reported to have said, If I don’t write it down immediately I forget it right away. If I put it into a sketchbook I never forget it, and I never have to look it up again.

[*] The important thing is to start. At the end of John Fantes book Dreams from Bunker Hill, the character, a writer, reminds himself that if he can write one great line, he can write two and if he can write two he can write three, and if he can write three, he can write forever. He pauses. Even that seemed insurmountable. So he types out four lines from one of his favorite poems. What the hell, he says, a man has to start someplace.

[*] In fact, a lot of writers use that last technique. In Tobias Wolffs autobiographical novel Old School, the character types the passages from his favorite books just to know what it feels like to have those words flow through his fingertips. Hunter S. Thompson often did the same thing. This is another reason why technologies like ebooks and Evernote are inferior to physical interaction. Just highlighting something and saving it to a computer? Theres no tactile memory there.

[*] The greatest part of a writers time is spent in reading; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. Samuel Johnson

[*] Tim Ferriss has said that the goal for a productive writing life is two crappy pages a day. Just enough to make progress, not too ambitious to be intimidating.

[*] They say breakfast (protein) in the morning helps brain function. But in my experience, thats a trade-off with waking up and getting started right away. Apparently Kurt Vonnegut only ate after he worked for 2 hours. Maybe he felt like after that hed earned food.

[*] Michael Malice has advised dont edit while you write. I think this is good advice.

[*] In addition to making a distinction between editing and writing, Robert Greene advises to make an equally important distinction between research and writing. Trying to find where youre going while youre doing it is begging to get horribly lost. Writing is easier when the research is done and the framework has been laid out.

[*] Nassim Taleb wrote in Antifragile that every sentence in the book was a derivation, an application or an interpretation of the short maxim he opened with. THAT is why you want to get your thesis down and perfect. It makes the whole book/essay easier.

[*] Break big projects down into small, discrete chunks. As I am writing a book, I create a separate document for each chapter, as I am writing them. Its only later when I have gotten to the end that these chapters are combined into a single file. Why? The same reason it feels easier to swim seven sets of ten laps, than to swim a mile. Breaking it up into pieces makes it seem more achievable. The other benefit in writing? It creates a sense that each piece must stand on its own.

[*] Embrace what the strategist and theorist John Boyd called the draw-down period. Take a break right before you start. To think, to reflect, to doubt.

[*] On being a writer: All the days of his life he should be reading as faithfully as his partaking of food; reading, watching, listening. John Fante

[*] Dont get caught up with pesky details. When I am writing a draft, I try not to be concerned with exact dates, facts or figures. If I remember that a study conducted by INSERT UNIVERSITY found that XX% of businesses fail in the first FIVE/SIX? months, thats what I write (exactly like that). If I am writing that on June XX, 19XX Ronald Reagan gave his famous Tear Down This Wall speech in Berlin in front of XX,XXX people, thats how its going to look. Momentum is the most important thing in writing, so Ill fill the details in later. I just need to get the sentences down first. “Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” is how Joshua Wolf Shenk put it.

[*] Raymond Chandler had a trick of using small pieces of paper so he would never be afraid to start over. Also with only 12-15 lines per page, it forced economy of thought and actionwhich is why his stuff is so readable.

[*] In The Artists Way, Julia Cameron reminds us that our morning pages and our journaling dont count as writing. Just as walking doesnt count as exercise, this is just priming the pumpits a meditative experience. Make sure you treat it as such.

[*] Steven Pressfield said that he used to save each one of his manuscripts on a disk that hed keep in the glovebox of his car. Robert Greene told me he sometimes puts a copy of his manuscript in the trunk of his car just in case. I bought a fireproof gun safe and keep my stuff in therejust in case.

[*] My editor Niki Papadopoulos at Penguin: Its not what a book is. Its what a book does.

[*] While you are writing, read things totally unrelated to what youre writing. Youll be amazed at the totally unexpected connections youll make or strange things youll discover. As Shelby Foote put it in an interview with The Paris Review: I cant begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.

[*] Writing requires what Cal Newport calls deep workperiods of long, uninterrupted focus and creativity. If you dont give yourself enough of this time, your work suffers. He recommends recording your deep work time each dayso you actually know if youre budgeting properly.

[*] Software does not make you a better writer. Fuck Evernote. Fuck Scrivner. You dont need to get fancy. If classics were created with quill and ink, youll probably be fine with a Word Document. Or a blank piece of paper. Dont let technology distract you. As Joyce Carol Oates put it in an interview, Every writer has written by hand until relatively recent times. Writing is a consequence of thinking, planning, dreaming this is the process that results in writing, rather than the way in which the writing is recorded.

[*] Talk about the ideas in the work everywhere. Talk about the work itself nowhere. Dont be the person who tweets Im working on my novel. Be too busy writing for that. Helen Simpson has Faire et se taire from Flaubert on a Post-it near her desk, which she translates as Shut up and get on with it.

[*] Why cant you talk about the work? Its not because someone might steal it. Its because the validation you get on social media has a perverse effect. Youll less likely to put in the hard work to complete something that youve already been patted (or patted yourself) on the back for.

[*] When you find yourself stuck with writers block, pick up the phone and call someone smart and talk to them about whatever the specific area youre stuck with is. Not that youre stuck, but about the topic. By the time you put your phone down, youll have plenty to write. (As Seth Godin put it, nobody gets talkers block.)

[*] Keep a commonplace book with anecdotes, stories and quotes you can always usefrom inspiration to directly using in your writing. And these can be anything. H.L. Mencken for example, would methodically fill a notebook with incidents, recording scraps of dialogue and slang, columns from the New York Sun.

[*] As you write down quotes and observations in your commonplace book, make sure to do it by hand. As Raymond Chandler wrote, when you have to use your energy to put words down, you are more apt to make them count.

[*] Elizabeth Gilbert has a good trick for cutting: As you go along, Ask yourself if this sentence, paragraph, or chapter truly furthers the narrative. If not, chuck it. And as Stephen King famously put it, kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribblers heart, kill your darlings.

[*] Strenuous exercise everyday. For me, and for a lot of other writers, its running. Novelist Don DeLillo told The Paris Review how after writing for four hours, he goes running to shake off one world and enter another. Joyce Carol Oates, in her ode to running, said that the twin activities of running and writing keep the writer reasonably sane and with the hope, however illusory and temporary, of control.

[*] Ask yourself these four questions from George Orwell: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? Then finish with these final two questions: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

[*] As a writer you need to make use of everything that happens around you and use it as material. Make use of Seinfelds question: Im never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I am thinking, Can I do something with that?

[*] Airplanes with no wifi are a great place to write and even better for editing. Because there is nowhere to go and nothing else to do.

[*] Print and put a couple of important quotes up on the wall to help guide you (either generally, or for a specific project). Heres a quote from a scholar describing why Ciceros speeches were so effective which I put on my wall while I was writing my first book. At his best [Cicero] offered a sustained interest, a constant variety, a consummate blend of humour and pathos, of narrative and argument, of description and declamation; while every part is subordinated to the purpose of the whole, and combines, despite its intricacy of detail, to form a dramatic and coherent unit. (emphasis mine)

[*] Focus on what youre saying, worry less about how. As William March wrote in The Bad Seed, A great novelist with something to say has no concern with style or oddity of presentation.

[*] A little trick I came up with. After every day of work, I save my manuscript as a new file (for example: EgoIsTheEnemy2-26.docx) which is saved on my computer and in Dropbox (before Dropbox, I just emailed it to myself). This way I keep a running record of the evolution of book. It comforts me that I can always go back if I mess something up or if I have to turn back around.

[*] Famous ad-man David Ogilvy put it bluntly: Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

[*] Envision who you are writing this for. Like really picture them. Dont go off in a cave and do this solely for yourself. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in his interview with The Paris Review: …every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. Thats the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.

[*] Do not chase exotic locations to do some writing. Budd Schulbergs novel The Disenchanted about his time with F. Scott Fitzgerald expresses the dangers well: It was a time everyone was pressing wonderful houses on us. I have a perfectly marvelous house for you to write in, theyd say. Of course no one needs marvelous houses to write in. I still knew that much. All you needed was one room. But somehow the next house always beckoned.”

[*] True enough, though John Fante said that when you get stuck writing, hit the road.

[*] Commitments (at the micro-level) are important too. An article a week? An article a month? A book a year? A script every six weeks? Pick something, but commit to itpublicly or contractually. Quantity produces quality, as Ray Bradbury put it.

[*] Dont ever write anything you dont like yourself and if you do like it, dont take anyones advice about changing it. They just dont know. Raymond Chandler

[*] Neil Strauss and Tucker Max gave me another helpful iteration of that idea (which I later learned is from Neil Gaiman): When someone tells you something is wrong with your writing, theyre usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, theyre almost always wrong.

[*] Ogilvy had another good rule: Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

[*] Print out the work and edit it by hand as often as possible. It gives you the readers point of view.

[*] Hemingway advised fellow writer Thomas Wolfe to break off work when you ‘are going good.’Then you can rest easily and on the next day easily resume. Brian Koppelman (Rounders, Billions) has referred to this as stopping on wet edge. It staves off the despair the next day.

[*] Keep the momentum: Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether. Jeanette Winterson

That taps me out for now. But every time I read I compile a few more notecards. Ill update you when Ive got another round to share.

In the meantime, stop reading stuff on the internet and get back to writing!

But if you have a second…share your own tips below.

Read more: http://thoughtcatalog.com/