Category Archives: Podcast

Write While True Episode 33: Collect Sentences

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The idea of collecting quotes is not something new. I think that’s the way most people think of note taking in general. There’s even a style of journal some people keep called a Commonplace book, which builds on this idea. In a Commonplace book, you are mostly collecting the thoughts of others. You might also put in your own reaction to those—your thoughts on those thoughts—but the focus is on the collecting.

I want to recommend a spin on this idea.

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Write While True Episode 32: Paragraph Checklist

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I think one sentence from David Lambuth really sums up what I want to say about paragraphs. Here it is.

There is no absolute rule for paragraphing. Your own feeling must be your guide.

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Write While True Episode 31: The Order of Words

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I’m going to use these three books again for today’s topic, which is the order of words in a sentence.

I love that these books tackle mundane topics, things that seem innate, but aren’t. I mean, we can order words into something grammatical without much thought. Even though a ten-sentence word has ten factorial possible orderings, we can easily find the handful that are legal English.

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Write While True Episode 30: Finding Nouns and Verbs

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Every book on writing tells you to avoid adverbs (and even adjectives). I find that hard to do in first drafts, but I do try to remove them in edits. You can tell that I haven’t done enough editing if you see that I “really like” something or that a new programming language is “pretty good”.

Season 3

Books

Sweep Editing

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Write While True Episode 29: Loose Sentences

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Last week, I spoke about something very fundamental—how to write complex sentences, and I’m going to continue along in that theme for what I’m now calling season three, drawing lessons from some of what I consider the greatest books about writing, and picking out ideas related to using words, sentences, and paragraphs. These are things that I’ve found that I need to work on, and I hope that that can help you too.

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Write While True Episode 28: Complex Sentences

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I like to sketch, mostly with pencil and charcoal on paper. One of the first things I needed to learn was how my drawing tools and the paper interacted. What kind of mark did each level of pencil hardness make, and how was that different from charcoal? What kind of paper worked best?

I did various exercises that helped me understand my own tools. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about this and trying to figure out what is the equivalent for this in writing. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

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Write While True Episode 27: Writing is Ordinary

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This is the fourth and final episode in a series I’m doing about the book Art & Fear [amazon affiliate link] by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

In this, the final episode of the series, I’m going to tell you what they think you need to be in order to be an artist.

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Write While True Episode 26: Making Makes a Maker

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I decided to do a four-part series on the lessons I learned from Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

This week, in part three, I want to talk about a quote about what art means to the maker.

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Write While True Episode 25: Stopping vs. Quitting

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I reread the book Art and Fear by Bayles and Orland and they had so many ideas for how to get people to make art, that it worked for me to start my blog going again, and then ultimately restarting this podcast.

For part two of this four part series on Art and Fear, I’m going to share the what they said that inspired me to not quit. Here’s the quote.

Quitting is fundamentally different from stopping, the latter happens all the time. Quitting happens once. Quitting means not starting again, and art is all about starting again.

That quote is really the inspiration behind season two, and the episodes I’ve made since I restarted.

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Write While True Episode 24: Thousands of Variations

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One of the things that got me back to podcasting after a two year break was rereading Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

This time, while I was reading it, I kept a lot of notes and found four themes that resonated with me and helped me get going again.

The first theme is very practical. It’s what they think is the secret to being prolific. For the past two months I have been applying it a lot.

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