reading my old writing and it’s striking how i wrote about so many of the same things, but far more tediously. writing is an endeavor that can reach deep into the ether of infinite possibilities. its challenge seems superficially easy: just write one good sentence after another

i see more clearly how this is true of many other creative endeavors too. a good painting is simply one good brushstroke after another. a good song is simply one good melody after another. a good movie is one good frame after another

if you have taste, you can notice when something you made is good. but for the most part, when you’re starting out, most of what you make will not be good. and it won’t be too clear why. you may have to work through many not-good ways of doing things in order to get to good

why am I writing this particular thread? there’s a feeling i’m trying to capture, the feeling of being 20 years into an endeavor and looking back at the early work and noticing things I didn’t see at the time. What is it? What am I noticing?

most writing, sentence by sentence, is a particular path through a tree of possibilities. at every step, you have the opportunity to branch in another direction. in my experience, it’s very difficult to learn “how to branch well” except through sheer volume of practice.

why not? can’t you just read some books about it? ask a pro for advice about it? such inputs can help somewhat, yes. but the thing you really want to develop is a fingertip sensitivity to your own personal rhythms, at every scale. u wanna feel how the page responds to your touch

re: good sentences, the thing is a bullet list of a hundred or a thousand good sentences might make for excellent tweets, but they don’t necessarily make for a good book the goodness of a sentence is not just what it is, but how it sits in relation to everything around it

and a lot of the work of writing is about studying how words relate to each other victor wooten said something similar about music: we teach you pitch when we should be teaching you *context*

and i think the other thing that’s really striking to me is how a body of work becomes more valuable over time as you keep working. you start to notice things that were missing, things that were unsaid. the wrong turns become interesting the way a gnarly old tree does

my wish for all creatives is that you stick with it long enough, that you return to it often enough, that you get to see how the magic blossoms more and more over the years. you’ll notice things in your work a decade from now that you can’t notice today. i hope you stick with it