A Comprehensive Guide to Writing Advice: Lessons from the Masters

Have you ever found yourself staring at a blank screen, fingers hovering over the keyboard, unsure where to begin? Or perhaps you’ve finished writing a piece only to feel it lacks vitality and fails to resonate with readers? If so, you’re not alone. These are challenges every writer faces at some point. The good news is that writing isn’t some mystical talent reserved for a chosen few—it’s a skill that can be learned, practiced, and mastered.

In this comprehensive guide, I’ll share valuable insights collected over years from various writing masters. These recommendations span from sentence structure to character development, from nonfiction writing to fiction creation. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced author, these techniques will help elevate your writing, making your words more engaging and impactful.

Why Is Writing Advice So Important?

Writing transcends merely stringing words into sentences—it’s about conveying thoughts, communicating emotions, and building worlds. Excellent writing immerses readers, making them lose track of time. Poor writing, regardless of its inherent value, leaves readers confused and frustrated.

So what constitutes good writing? Simply put, the goal of excellent writing is to minimize the brainpower required to understand the text while maximizing reading enjoyment. This means your writing should be clear, engaging, and easy to comprehend.

In the following sections, we’ll explore various writing techniques—from fundamental to advanced, from universal principles to genre-specific advice.

General Writing Techniques

High-Level Writing Advice

Steven Pinker’s Perspective on Writing

In “The Sense of Style,” Steven Pinker proposes a crucial insight: the key to excellent style lies in clearly conceiving the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate. Different writing scenarios demand different communication approaches:

  • Someone texting can act as if they’re participating in a real conversation
  • A college student writing a paper pretends to know more about the subject than the reader
  • An activist drafting a manifesto writes as if standing before a crowd, stirring emotions

The essential point is understanding the communication scenario you’re creating and adapting your writing style accordingly.

Julian Shapiro’s “Creativity Faucet” Theory

Imagine your creativity as a backed-up water pipe. The first mile of piping contains wastewater that must be emptied before clear water flows through. The same principle applies to writing:

  1. Accept bad ideas: When beginning a writing session, jot down all the poor ideas that reflexively come to mind
  2. Avoid self-criticism: Openly accept these inferior thoughts rather than resisting them
  3. Wait for strong ideas: Once bad ideas are emptied, powerful concepts begin to emerge

Many creators never move beyond their wastewater phase because they resist their imperfect ideas. If you’ve opened a blank document, written a few thoughts, then walked away because you weren’t struck by inspiration, you too haven’t progressed beyond this stage.

Notable creators like Neil Gaiman and Ed Sheeran employ this technique—they understand that the brain has a linear creativity pipeline that requires clearing.

Practical Approaches to Writer’s Block

When discussing writer’s block, it typically means your subconscious recognizes something is wrong. The solution is straightforward: continue writing, even if it’s terrible.

By persisting, you’ll often identify the problem. For new writers, your task is to transform yourself into someone capable of writing great novels through the act of writing itself—because you aren’t there yet. J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” went through 13 drafts.

One writer shared his experience: “Writing the chapter the wrong way will put it into my subconscious, and the next day my subconscious will tell me why it’s wrong. Nine times out of ten I set that chapter aside, write a new one, and that chapter goes in the book and it’s good.”

The Art of Sentence Length

Eugene Wei on Writing Rhythm

One of the simplest methods to improve your prose and maintain reader attention is to vary sentence length. The longer your text, the more desirable sentence length variation becomes.

Reading your text aloud effectively detects sentence rhythm—the cadence of breathing and speaking tends to mimic the brain’s ability to process words and sentences.

Gary Provost’s Classic Example

“

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”

Practical Examples for Comparison

Monotonous version:
“The sun was setting as Sarah walked along the beach. She enjoyed the feeling of the sand between her toes. The waves crashed against the shore. The seagulls cried overhead.”

Improved version:
“As the sun set, Sarah strolled along the beach, savoring the sensation of sand between her toes. Waves crashed against the shore while seagulls cried overhead.”

Another example:
“He picked up the book and started reading. He couldn’t put it down. He was completely engrossed. Hours went by unnoticed.”

Improved version:
“Picking up the book, he began reading and found himself unable to put it down. Completely engrossed, hours slipped by unnoticed.”

Techniques for Word Choice

Scott Alexander’s Recommendations

If two consecutive sentences begin with the same word, it sounds awkward. If three or four do, it seems strange. If an entire paragraph follows this pattern, people start questioning their sanity.

Any repetition of words and structures will stand out to your reader. Ensure this emphasis strengthens your point rather than causing confusion.

Practical Examples

Repetitive version:
“She opened the door. She saw him standing there. She felt her heart race. She couldn’t believe he was here.”

Improved version:
“Opening the door, she saw him standing there. Her heart raced, and she couldn’t believe he was actually here.”

Fiction Writing Techniques

Word Choice and Voice Selection

Steven Pinker on Active vs. Passive Voice

Even when both the actor and action target are visible in a scene, choosing between active and passive voice allows authors to maintain reader focus on one character before revealing an interesting fact involving that character.

This is because reader attention typically begins with the entity named by the sentence subject. Active and passive constructions differ in which character becomes the subject, and thus who initially occupies the reader’s mental spotlight.

  • Active construction trains the reader’s gaze on someone performing an action
  • Passive construction trains the reader’s gaze on someone receiving action

The problem with passives that bog down bureaucratic and academic prose is that they’re not selected with these purposes in mind. They indicate an absent-minded writer who has forgotten they should be staging an event for the reader.

Practical Examples

  1. “A firefighter rescued the cat from the tree.”

    • Active voice focuses on the person performing the action (firefighter)

    “The cat was rescued from the tree by a firefighter.”

    • Passive voice shifts focus to the entity receiving the action (cat)

  2. “The teacher gave the students a challenging assignment.”

    • Active voice

    “A challenging assignment was given to the students by the teacher.”

    • Passive voice

Brandon Sanderson’s Conciseness Principle

You should aim to communicate the most information in the fewest words possible. If you can convey more information with the same word count, or the same information with fewer words, that’s always preferable.

For example: “I saw a dog walk by me”—unless you’re specifically drawing attention to the fact that you saw the dog, the first two words are unnecessary. Simply write “A dog walked by me” to save two words.

If you haven’t specified the dog breed, you can communicate more information with identical word count by mentioning it. “A poodle walked past me” is clearly superior writing!

Maintaining Reader Attention

Keith Johnstone on Status Changes

Audiences remain engaged when character status is being modified. Even when actors perform in gibberish, audiences laugh heartily. We don’t understand what’s being said, and neither do the actors, but status reversal alone captivates us.

If you’ve seen great comedians performing in an unfamiliar language, you understand this phenomenon.

John Truby on Conflict Networks

Once you establish a hero and opponent competing for the same goal, you must steadily build conflict until the final battle. Your purpose is to maintain constant pressure on your hero, as this forces character development.

How you build conflict and apply pressure depends primarily on how you distribute attacks against the hero. In average or simple stories, the hero conflicts with only one opponent. This standard opposition offers clarity but doesn’t allow development of profound, powerful conflict sequences or let audiences see the hero operating within a broader society.

Key point: Simplistic opposition between two characters kills any chance for depth, complexity, or human life reality in your story. For that, you need a web of oppositions.

Brandon Sanderson on Progressive Revelation

A powerful reader sensation involves wanting to know or see something while feeling progressively closer to it. For instance, in “Inferno,” readers are teased that something exciting awaits at hell’s center circle, and each chapter brings them one circle closer.

Books inherently create this sensation because readers see pages accumulating while remaining content diminishes. Perhaps exaggerating this effect by having page numbers count down could enhance the experience.

The Art of Twist Endings

One of the best approaches to “twist endings” involves delivering a better payoff than promised. For example, in “Mistborn,” the expected payoff is “we steal the Lord Ruler’s atium reserve and escape,” which transforms into “we overthrow the empire.”

In fantasy literature, you rarely encounter problems when giving readers more than they expect. Conversely, failing to deliver on promises is not a virtue.

Key Elements of Enjoyable Stories

I believe whimsy and memorable characters represent the most crucial aspects of entertaining stories.

Character Development

John Truby on Moral Argument

The most common use of dialogue for moral argument occurs when an ally criticizes the hero for immoral actions taken while pursuing a goal. The ally contends the hero’s actions are wrong. The hero, who hasn’t yet experienced self-revelation, defends their behavior.

Great storytelling isn’t just conflict between characters. It’s conflict between characters and their values. When your hero undergoes character change, they challenge and transform fundamental beliefs, leading to new moral action. A worthy opponent also possesses beliefs that come under assault. The hero’s beliefs lack meaning and don’t find expression in the story unless they conflict with at least one other character’s beliefs, preferably the opponent’s.

Starting with Character Flaws

Regardless of your story, beginning with your hero’s significant character weakness proves extremely important. This means the first scene should establish your hero’s character flaw.

Donald Maass on Emotional Craft

Select a story moment when your protagonist feels moved, unsettled, or disturbed. Write down all emotions inherent in this moment, both obvious and hidden.

Next, considering their feelings, document how your protagonist might act out. What represents the most significant action your protagonist could take? What would be explosive, transgressive, or offensive? What would be symbolic? What could your protagonist say that cuts directly to the heart of the matter or unites others in understanding?

Add a setting detail that only your protagonist would notice, or that everyone notices but your protagonist perceives uniquely.

Finally, return and delete all emotions you initially recorded. Let actions and spoken words perform the work. Do they feel excessive, dangerous, or over-the-top? Use them anyway. Others will indicate if you’ve gone too far, but more likely, you haven’t gone far enough.

Layers of Emotional Expression

Writing what characters feel should enable readers to experience those emotions too, right? Actually, the opposite often proves true. Putting character feelings on the page frequently leaves readers feeling nothing.

Writers’ initially chosen emotions often appear obvious, easy, and safe. To create emotional surprise, you must dig deeper:

  1. Select any story moment when your protagonist feels strongly
  2. Identify the feeling
  3. Ask your protagonist: “What else are you feeling now?” Write it down
  4. Ask again: “Okay, what else are you feeling now?” Write that down too

Now work with that third, deeper emotion. Examine it four ways:

  1. Objectify it through analogy: What does experiencing this emotion feel like?
  2. Make a moral judgment: Is feeling this good or bad? Why?
  3. Create an alternative: What would a better person feel instead?
  4. Justify this feeling: It’s the only possible response at this moment, and here’s why

Survey the scene. What does your protagonist see that others miss? Add one detail only your protagonist would notice, perceived in their unique way.

Write a new passage for this story moment where your character deeply (and specifically) experiences this third-level emotion.

This method’s important aspect is the extensive exploration mentioned earlier. Why delve so deeply? One reason involves creating longer passages for readers. This generates processing time—perhaps fifteen seconds—for readers’ brains. This interval proves necessary, allowing readers to arrive at their own emotional responses, which we cannot predict.

Being obvious and telling readers what to feel prevents them from feeling it. Lighting an unexpected match, however, lets readers ignite their own emotions, which may well turn out to be the primary, obvious ones. Third-level emotions represent the effective approach.

Brandon Sanderson’s Character Engagement Techniques

Methods to make audiences root for characters:

  1. Make them likable or kind
  2. Show them sharing readers’ feelings (affection for family?)

    • This partially explains why Spider-Man ranks as many people’s favorite superhero. Stories typically begin with him being down on his luck romantically, too shy to talk to the girl next door, reading comic books, playing video games, facing unpopularity/bullying at school, working a miserable job, and living in a terrible apartment—all highly relatable for the comic genre’s target audience
  3. Show other characters liking them

    • This represents a surprisingly handy and effective technique
  4. Establish rooting interest

    • Give characters motivations that interest readers
    • Ideally, they should want something unattainable (or face obstacles obtaining it). Connects to their flaws, handicaps, or limitations
    • Establishes personal plot connection (Luke doesn’t truly want to become a Jedi or defeat the Empire until his parental figures are killed)
  5. Promise future progress

    • Establish a flaw they’ll correct or a journey they’ll undertake. Often driven by mystery (Will they become what we know they can? Will Spider-Man become a superhero?)
    • Crucially, you must signpost that the character needs to change somehow so readers know
  6. Three-dimensional character sliders

    • Imagine each character has three “sliders”: likability, competence, and proactivity. Often, your main character should start deficient in one area, with the story focusing on “increasing that slider”
    • Character movement on any scale creates progress sensation throughout the story
    • Spider-Man’s journey involves becoming super competent. This actually remains uncommon in superhero movies. Tony Stark always remains a badass, instantly becoming more so after creating his suit. Miles Morales spends the first four-fifths of “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” being terrible at basic Spider-Man skills, including web-slinging. He begins as Frodo and ends as Aragorn
  7. Wants vs. needs

    • A common growth demonstration shows characters wanting something different from what they need. For example, Spider-Man thinks he wants coolness and fame, but needs to learn that with great power comes great responsibility
  8. Competence exhibition

    • Alternatively, feature numerous competent characters performing impressive actions. In “Ocean’s Eleven,” no competence change occurs—the fun derives from watching awesome people do awesome things
  9. Motivation importance

    • Motivation truly matters most. Establishing character motivations early proves crucial. Often, when I receive confusing alpha reader feedback, it’s because I haven’t properly established character motivations
    • This causes stilted dialogue, frequently occurring when character motivation contradicts their dialogue/actions
  10. Three-dimensional character technique

    • An easy method for creating three-dimensional characters involves giving them multiple, conflicting motivations. Consider Kaladin’s conflict about becoming a surgeon versus soldier
  11. Specific example

    • Simple example: Create a character who dreams of traveling but cannot due to poverty or disability. Show them undertaking significant efforts to obtain a stamp for their atlas, demonstrating all other stamps they’ve collected representing places they would have visited without this quirk. This establishes tremendous empathy and motivation. If they receive an adventure invitation and must go despite handicaps or limitations, readers will root for them
  12. Motivation power

    • Another example: “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” The concept of a child wanting to avenge his father, having mentally prepared what he’d say when meeting the murderer, yet having slightly abandoned hope for his dream, proves somewhat relatable and extremely empathetic. It’s actually so empathetic that he seems more like the main character than Westley does
  13. Quirk-connection

    • If your character has a quirk, connect it to their motivation, making it more interesting
  14. Effort versus outcome

    • People tend toward strong empathy for characters who try hard but fail for reasons beyond their control

Eliezer Yudkowsky on Intelligent Characters

All story characters should demonstrate “level-1 intelligence,” the minimum requirement for believable characters. This means they should possess an “inner spark of optimization.”

Write characters with an inner spark of life and optimization—not characters performing super-amazing clever actions, but characters routinely trying to optimize their lives in reasonably self-aware fashion.

If you create a character you genuinely respect, you’ll hesitate to model them as stupid. You can simply write a character as if they’re BBC’s Sherlock, Miles Vorkosigan, or any person whose thinking you feel visceral respect for. Your literary voice will take over and shine through, with most readers not noticing similarity unless informed… if you sympathized sufficiently with Sherlock or Vorkosigan to have felt their inner lives, generating them in new roles by continuing to lead that life from within.

Alternatively, returning to simpler cheating, you can check for intelligence by imagining yourself in the character’s position. What would you do as a vampire? What would you do if both a vampire and werewolf loved you? If the answer involves something you’ve never encountered in stories, you might have a plot.

Every Level 1 Intelligent character wants to discard your precious plot out the window and will seize any opportunity to do so. You must craft their situations so their optimizing responses drive the plot in required directions. If they must make mistakes, make them intelligent mistakes; ideally, prevent readers from noticing initially.

Secrets of Character Depth

Most well-written characters want something—or think they want something. More fascinating characters also possess something they don’t want you to know. The best ones additionally have something they’re not pulling off nearly as well as they believe.

Writing Style

Frederick Reiken on Psychic Distance

Many authors create “flat” characters, leaving readers not truly seeing them. This often stems from failing to invent the main character visually and in relation to objective external context. The writer hasn’t “conceived the fictional construct as other,” effectively stuck inside the character, typically right behind their eyes. What occurs is author-narrator-character merger.

These three components must separate:

  1. The author exists outside the book’s textual universe
  2. The narrator represents a language construct invented to present and translate novel action so readers remain oriented with narrative flow
  3. The character is the actual character—you understand this part

You might assume that when the narrator serves as the book’s protagonist, as in all first-person novels, no distinction exists between narrator and character. Incorrect! The key to successful first-person novels lies in the relationship between that first person as narrator and as character.

Here are five examples of psychic distance, from most to least distant, from John Gardner’s “The Art of Fiction”:

  1. It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of the doorway
  2. Henry J. Warbutton had never much cared for snowstorms
  3. Henry hated snowstorms
  4. God how he hated these damn snowstorms
  5. Snow. Under your collar, deep inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul

Most third-person narratives proceed with constant psychic distance modulation, moving like a camera lens between long-range establishing shots and limited, close-range character viewpoints, then back to longer-range shots. But when authors haven’t fully imagined the point-of-view character—often because they haven’t fully conceived the character as genuine other—the ANC relationship structures with little/no psychic distance between narrator and character, preventing us from seeing the character moving through settings or situations, creating what I term a merged effect. Regarding Gardner’s examples, problematic merger cases never increase psychic distance, typically remaining continuously at example #3 level. That is, we maximum experience being inside the character’s head but never actually see them.

Brandon Sanderson’s Dialogue Techniques

When writing dialogue, aim to write tag-free dialogue that remains clear to readers regarding who’s speaking, especially in multi-person conversations. Achieve this through consistent character word choice, sentence length, metaphor propensity, and metaphor types. For example, someone raised on docks might say “gutted like a fish.” Varying their argument types and positions also enhances dialogue quality.

Additionally, strive to communicate character details through internal experience rather than direct statements. For example, “of course she doesn’t want to get her shoes dirty” rather than “she hated her because she was a prep.” For most writers, this represents a lifelong journey, particularly in first drafts.

Mastering this skill will make your books sell fast. If your opening chapters contain almost no info-dumps, feature snappy dialogue revealing character through speech patterns, and convey setting and character through contextual clues, you’re outperforming 99% of people seeking publication or self-publishing. If you practice one skill, make it this one.

Worldbuilding

Developing Existing Elements

Having three well-developed fantasy religions based on common origins proves better and more interesting than ten unrelated religions.

Introduce minimal worldbuilding necessary to convey scenes.

Developing Magic Systems

After adding magical mechanics, identify measures the population might take to “exploit” them. Your society won’t feel authentic if changes produce no second-order effects.

Theme

Eliezer Yudkowsky on Genuine Moral Conflicts

A true, untainted ideal doesn’t necessarily feature pure advocates or policies without downsides. A genuine ideal represents a goal worth optimizing for despite everything, retaining warm, bright feelings even in complicated worlds. If you cannot let yourself feel that warm brightness and discuss it publicly, you cannot incorporate it into your story or make readers sympathize with your ideals. Look inward for the morals, ethics, aesthetics, virtues, and reality aspects you still treasure. You create genuine moral conflict when bringing two such high ideals into opposition, balanced so you’re uncertain of the right side; or when discovering moral questions within high ideals whose answers you’re unsure of, constructing stories around them.

Plot

David Deutsch on Good Explanations

In some stories, plot matters little—the story concerns something else. But good plots always rest implicitly or explicitly on good explanations of how and why events happen, given fictional premises. In such cases, even with wizard premises, the story isn’t truly supernatural: it concerns imaginary physics laws and societies, plus real problems and true ideas.

This section lacks context regarding Deutsch’s “good explanations” meaning. I believe the most crucial component involves being “hard to vary while still fulfilling their functions”:

  • Good explanations often appear strikingly simple or elegant
  • Good explanations are distinguished by being hard to vary while still doing their jobs
  • In Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play “Amadeus,” Mozart’s music is described: “Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.” This recalls John Archibald Wheeler’s remark beginning this book, discussing hoped-for fundamental physics unified theory: “an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it…how could it have been otherwise?”

Shaffer and Wheeler described the same attribute: being hard to vary while still fulfilling functions. The first case involves aesthetically good music; the second, good scientific explanations. Wheeler describes scientific theories as beautiful while characterizing them as hard to vary.

Nonfiction Writing Techniques

Maintaining Reader Attention

Scott Alexander on Paragraph Rewards

Completing paragraphs or sections provides micro-bursts of accomplishment and reward. This helps readers chunk basic insights together for later recall. You want people thinking—”okay, insight, good, another insight, good, another insight, good”—eventually tying all insights into higher-level understanding. Then restart, eventually connecting all high-level insights at the end. This creates nice, structured, manageable reading. If readers follow winding thought streams wherever they lead, mental workload increases, causing boredom and wandering attention.

Varying Reading Experiences

Your brain grows bored focusing too long on identical content. Circumvent this by making activities appear like multiple different things. Sometimes this involves simple, almost silly techniques like placing Roman numerals I, II, etc., at natural article breaks, making your brain think “Oh, I guess this contains different sections.” Other times, you must genuinely vary the reading experience.

Microhumor

Microhumor describes elements that aren’t jokes in laugh-out-loud comedian senses, but still elicit faint reader smiles during skimming.

I consider microhumor extremely important, perhaps the primary factor separating truly enjoyable writers from technically proficient but tedious ones. Consider a simplistic behaviorist model where you continue reward-producing activities and stop non-rewarding ones. Reading offers limited reward sources. One involves gaining important insights. Another involves hearing content supporting ingroups or bashing outgroups. The third—possibly largest—is humor. Who struggles to complete truly hilarious joke books?

Steve Sailer’s Technique

A useful Dave Barry technique involves making the sentence’s final word the funniest.

Steven Pinker on Strong Openings

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.” Good writing starts powerfully—not with clichés (“Since the dawn of time”), not with banalities (“Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with…”), but with content-rich observations provoking curiosity.

Julian Shapiro’s Hooks

Hooks represent half-told stories. Tease fascinating elements without fully revealing details.

Hook generation methods:

  1. Ask yourself: “If others wrote my introduction, what most captivating questions could they pose to make me excited to read this?”
  2. Write those questions down, even without answers
  3. Rank questions by personal interest level
  4. Top questions become hooks: Pose them in your introduction without revealing answers

Dopamine Hit Feedback

Request feedback providers highlight every sentence giving them dopamine hits—those “that was interesting” moments. For each hit, increase a counter at the corresponding sentence’s end. Like this (3). For sections without dopamine hits, shorten them or inject more insight and surprise.

Short Paragraphs

Use paragraphs of five sentences or fewer. This cushions paragraphs with white space, reducing perceived reading workload. Short paragraphs also provide more pausing and reflection opportunities.

Idea Flow

Scott Alexander on Evidence Organization

If writing three paragraphs presenting different evidence for the same subsequent conclusion, ensure readers know this.

Use strong concept handles. The concept-handle idea itself represents a concept handle—a catchy phrase summarizing complex topics.

FullMeta_Rationalist’s Mini-Theses

English teachers claim every essay needs a thesis. My personal rule goes further: each paragraph should have a “mini-thesis.” It needn’t always appear on paper but should at least be implied.

Editing test: Annotate each paragraph’s margin with its mini-thesis. If you cannot construct concise mini-theses for each paragraph, you’ve written a “run-on paragraph”—a single paragraph deserving division into multiple paragraphs.

Second test: Concatenate all mini-theses (plus the main thesis) into one paragraph. Does it serve as a logically organized essay summary? If not, audiences won’t find your argument very cogent.

Steven Pinker on Structural Parallelism

A bare syntactic tree, minus branch-tip words, lingers in memory briefly after words disappear, remaining available as a template for parsing subsequent phrases. If new phrases share previous structures, their words slot into awaiting trees, enabling effortless absorption. This pattern is called structural parallelism, representing one of literature’s oldest elegant (and often stirring) prose tricks:

Note how parallel syntax helps readers comprehend even most unintelligible garden path sentences: “Though the horse guided past the barn walked with ease, the horse raced past the barn fell.”

Topic-Comment Ordering

People learn by integrating new information into existing knowledge networks. They dislike facts hurled from nowhere, forced to keep them levitating in short-term memory until finding relevant embedding backgrounds moments later. Topic-then-comment and given-then-new orderings majorly contribute to coherence—the feeling of sentences flowing smoothly rather than jerking readers around.

Outline Creation

One outline creation method involves jotting ideas randomly on pages or index cards, then identifying seemingly related ones. Reorder items with related idea clusters placed nearby, arrange clusters belonging together into larger clusters, group those into still larger clusters, etc., eventually producing tree-like outlines.

onyomi’s “Uneven U”

“The uneven U”: Basically, if you categorize sentences 1-5, with 1 being bland detail/fact statements and 5 representing abstract, synthesis-oriented statements, most paragraphs, subsections, chapters, and books should follow roughly “4-2-1-3-4-5″ish (“uneven U”) patterns. The idea: each new paragraph, subsection, or chapter should introduce and/or connect to preceding section big ideas, delve into corroborating details, then reach higher synthesis levels by the end.

Communication Techniques

Scott Alexander on Concrete Examples

If making complicated points, start with concrete examples. If making very complicated points, start with many concrete examples.

You sound more credible, and opponents less persuasive, raising possible counterarguments yourself. This holds true regardless of your counter-counterarguments’ effectiveness.

Steven Pinker on Technical Term Explanations

Considerate writers cultivate habits of adding brief explanations to common technical terms, as in “Arabidopsis, a flowering mustard plant,” rather than bare “Arabidopsis” (seen in many science articles). This isn’t merely magnanimous: writers explaining technical terms can multiply readership thousandfold at minimal character cost—literature’s equivalent of picking hundred-dollar bills off sidewalks.

Readers also appreciate copious “for example,” “as in,” and “such as” usage, since explanation without examples barely surpasses no explanation. For example: Here’s rhetorical term syllepsis explanation: “using a word relating to, qualifying, or governing two-plus other words but having different meanings relative to each.” Understood? Now suppose I continue with “…such as when Benjamin Franklin said, ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.'” Clearer, no? No? Sometimes two examples beat one, letting readers triangulate which example aspects relate to definitions. Suppose I add “…or when Groucho Marx said, ‘You can leave in a taxi, and if you can’t get a taxi, you can leave in a huff’?”

The Power of Chunking

Chunking isn’t just memory improvement trickery; it represents higher intelligence’s lifeblood. As children, we see someone hand cookies to another, remembering it as giving. One person gives another cookies for bananas; we chunk both giving acts together, considering the sequence trading. Person 1 trades Person 2 bananas for shiny metal pieces, knowing Person 3 will trade cookies for them; we consider it selling. Numerous people buying and selling comprise markets. Activity aggregated across markets gets chunked into economy. The economy now becomes an entity responding to central bank actions; we call this monetary policy. One monetary policy type, involving central banks buying private assets, gets chunked as quantitative easing. And so continues.

Through reading and learning, we master numerous abstractions, each becoming mental units instantly recallable and sharable via naming. Adult minds brimming with chunks form powerful reasoning engines but carry communication costs: failure to communicate with other minds lacking identical chunks. Many educated adults would miss discussions criticizing presidents for insufficient “quantitative easing,” though they’d understand spelled-out processes. High school students might miss “monetary policy” conversations; schoolchildren might not follow “the economy” discussions.

Personal Recommendations

I frequently consider sentence and sub-sentence level ambiguity, diligently avoiding garden path sentences. For example, I never use “since” meaning “because” since such usage easily creates garden path sentences (“since

” often allows dual initial interpretations).

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How can I overcome writer’s block?
A: According to Julian Shapiro’s “creativity faucet” theory, writer’s block often stems from attempting to skip the “wastewater” phase. The solution involves accepting bad ideas and continuing to write, even poorly. By emptying bad ideas, your brain starts recognizing elements causing badness and avoiding them, eventually allowing strong ideas to emerge.

Q: What are garden path sentences?
A: Garden path sentences initially lead readers toward one interpretation that later proves incorrect. For example, “Though the horse guided past the barn walked with ease, the horse raced past the barn fell.” Readers might initially misinterpret the structure until later information clarifies. Avoiding such sentences improves readability.

Q: How can I make characters more three-dimensional?
A: Per Brandon Sanderson’s advice, give characters multiple conflicting motivations. For instance, a character wanting to travel but facing financial constraints creates depth. Additionally, reveal character traits through actions and internal experiences rather than direct statements.

Q: How can nonfiction writing maintain reader interest?
A: Use microhumor, short paragraphs, and structural variation. Scott Alexander recommends Roman numerals or subsection breaks to create reward sensations. Steven Pinker emphasizes starting with powerful observations, while Julian Shapiro suggests hooks—half-told stories sparking curiosity.

Q: What is psychic distance?
A: Psychic distance describes the emotional or cognitive gap between narrator and character. According to Frederick Reiken, adjusting psychic distance (from objective description to internal monologue) helps readers see characters more authentically, avoiding author-narrator-character merger.

Q: How can I improve dialogue writing?
A: Brandon Sanderson recommends writing dialogue clear enough to identify speakers without tags. Distinguish characters through consistent word choices, sentence lengths, and metaphor usage. Additionally, ensure dialogue conveys character motivations and conflicts rather than merely advancing plots.

Q: What constitutes good plots?
A: Per David Deutsch, good plots rely on “good explanations”—accounts of how and why events occur, even with fictional premises. These explanations should be “hard to vary while still fulfilling their functions,” meaning they’re concise, elegant, and any changes would weaken the story.

Q: How can I create authentic worldbuilding?
A: Brandon Sanderson recommends expanding existing elements rather than adding new ones. For example, develop multiple religions from common origins. Additionally, ensure magical or technological changes produce second-order effects—societies would exploit them, making worlds feel genuine.

Q: What are genuine moral conflicts?
A: Eliezer Yudkowsky describes genuine moral conflicts as opposition between two noble ideals, or moral questions within ideals. Conflicts should be balanced, leaving readers uncertain about correct sides, based on values the author genuinely treasures.

Q: How can I vary sentence length effectively?
A: Refer to Gary Provost’s example, mixing short, medium, and long sentences to create rhythm. Use short sentences for emphasis, long sentences for detailed descriptions. Reading text aloud helps detect monotony, ensuring variations enhance readability.

Writing represents a lifelong learnable art. By applying these recommendations, you can progressively enhance your skills, creating engaging, impactful works. Remember—even masters begin with flawed first drafts. The crucial part is continuing to write.