3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Becoming a Good Writer

Having Good Ideas, the Toddler and the Sergeant & Writing vs. Publishing

Books, Busan, South Korea

I. Having Good Ideas

Writing is all about thinking through our ideas and putting them on paper in a way that’s compelling and meaningful. What’s often underestimated is to what extent having good ideas is a numbers game. Here’s American chemist Linus Pauling on the secret to generating ideas:

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

—Linus Pauling

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II. The Toddler and the Sergeant

But how do you actually go about throwing out the bad ideas and keeping the good ones? Here’s comedy legend Jerry Seinfeld on how to be a good writer:

The key to being a good writer, is to treat yourself like a baby, very extremely nurturing and loving.

Then switch over to Lou Gossett in An Officer and a Gentleman. And just be a harsh prick, a ball-busting son of a bitch: ‘That is just not good enough. That’s gotta come out, or it’s gotta be re-done or thrown away.’

So flipping back and forth between those two brain quadrants is the key to writing. When you’re wrting you wanna treat your brain like a toddler. It’s just all nurturing and loving and supportiveness. And then when you look at it the next day you wanna be just a hardass. And you switch back and forth.

—Jerry Seinfeld

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III. Writing vs. Publishing

Generating many ideas can give us the confidence to part ways with those that just don’t work. Because not every piece of writing has to be shared with the world. Humorist David Sedaris explains the difference between writing and publishing:

Don’t confuse publishing with writing. They’re two completely different things. Let the world take care of the publishing part. That’s not your job. I wrote every day for 15 years before my first book came out. That seemed normal to me. I throw away maybe a third of what I write. That’s normal to me. Sometimes it’s easy, but most times it’s not. That’s normal to me.

—David Sedaris

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Have a great week,

Chris
themindcollection.com