Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits

Lydia Davis, Essays One

Shortened for reading on the internet, from her wonderful collection Essays One:

1. Take notes regularly.

   1. Observe your own activity.

   2. Observe your own feelings (but not at tiresome length).

   3. Observe the behavior of others, both animal and human.

   4. Observe the weather, and be specific.

   5. Observe other types of behavior, including that of municipalities.

   6. Note facts.

   7. Note technical/historical facts.

2. Always work (note, write) from your own interest, never from what you think you should be noting or writing. Trust your own interest.

3. Be mostly self-taught.

4. Revise notes constantly—try to develop the ability to read them as though you had never seen them before, to see how well they communicate.

5. If you take notes regularly, sitting in an airport, for example, you can “grow” a story right then and there.

6. Taking notes as you sit outside at a café table, you can also begin to develop a poem.

7. Another advantage of revising constantly, regardless of whether you’re ever going to do anything more with what you’ve written, is that you practice, constantly, reading with fresh eyes, reading as the person coming fresh to this, never having seen it before.

8. Sentences or ideas reported from reality out of context can be wonderful. But then, when and if you use them in a piece of finished writing, beware of how much context you give them.

9. Go to primary sources and go to the great works to learn technique.

10. Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion—you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.

11. Have a book of writing exercises on hand. One I like is Brian Kiteley’s The 3 A.M. Epiphany.

12. After a session of writing, leave some clear time in which you can note down what your brain will continue to offer you.

13. If you want to be original, don’t labor to be original. Rather, work on yourself, your mind, and then say what you think.

14. Your notebook, or whatever you first write on or in, should be private, and there you should not censor at all, unless something offends even you too much to write it down.

15. Be patient; don’t try to rush your work or try to finish before you’re ready.

16. Work on your expertise with the technical aspects of writing English. Know what you’re doing, and what other writers are doing—specifically. Read books about language, and about style: most highly recommended of all is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style.

17. Learn as much as you can, as often as possible, about the origins of the words you’re using. You will use them more accurately, and it is also interesting.

18. Pay attention to the sounds of the language.

19. Be sure to read poetry, regularly, whether you are a poet or a writer of prose.

20. Be curious—be curious about as much as possible.

21. Free yourself from your device, for at least certain hours of the day—or at the very least one hour. Learn to be alone, all alone, without people and without a device turned on. Learn to experience the purity of that kind of concentration. Develop focus, learn to focus intently on one thing, uninterrupted, for a long time.

22. Saying less rather than more, which sometimes means cutting some of what you have, can be very effective.

23. Cutting quickens the pace and involves more happening in a shorter space. But this does not mean everything has to be short.

24. Keep in touch with the physical world.

25. Study dialogue.

26. Listen to people talking and copy down the choicer bits of what you hear.

27. Observe the traits of complex people in particular.

28. Learn at least one foreign language in your life, either on your own (it can be enjoyable) or in a class.

29. Translate at least one piece of writing, no matter how short, in your life—you owe it to your fellow Anglophone readers, who may be monolingual, and you owe it to the literature of other cultures.

30. Finally, maintain humility with regard to language and writing.