How to write: Stop not writing. Keep your butt in the chair. Write really bad small sections of the whole—passages, moments, episodes, memories—til you have an incredibly shitty 1st draft. Then take out the boring parts, the lies and pretensions. Then write a better 2nd draft.

“The 1st draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out & then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it…there may be something great in those 6 crazy pages that you would never have gotten by more rational, grown-up means” @annelamott.bsky.social Bird By Bird

Current favorite writing trick when I’m stuck with my dense impenetrable paragraphs and can’t thin it out: Open a new document. Paste a single topic(-like) sentence from dense document. Set a timer for 25 minutes. Write 100 words to support that sentence.