The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “writing”

Margaret Atwood’s 10 Rules of Writing
Margaret Atwood’s 10 Rules of Writing

“­Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.”

read article

Zadie Smith’s 10 Rules of Writing
Zadie Smith’s 10 Rules of Writing

“Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.”

read article

How to Read Like a Writer
How to Read Like a Writer

“All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another.”

read article

Story of a Writer: Ray Bradbury on Storytelling and Human Nature in 1963 Documentary
Story of a Writer: Ray Bradbury on Storytelling and Human Nature in 1963 Documentary

“Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.”

read article

Several Short Sentences About Writing
Several Short Sentences About Writing

“You can say smart, interesting, complicated things using short sentences. How long is a good idea?”

read article

Neil Gaiman’s 8 Rules of Writing
Neil Gaiman’s 8 Rules of Writing

“Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.”

read article

Why Emotional Excess is Essential to Writing and Creativity
Why Emotional Excess is Essential to Writing and Creativity

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”

read article

Ezra Pound’s List of the Six Types of Writers, Plus His Two Rules for Forming an Opinion
Ezra Pound’s List of the Six Types of Writers, Plus His Two Rules for Forming an Opinion

A taxonomy of scribe sensibilities, with some advice on how to make up your mind.

read article

A Few Don’ts for Those Beginning to Write Verse from Ezra Pound
A Few Don’ts for Those Beginning to Write Verse from Ezra Pound

“Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.”

read article

Susan Sontag on Writing
Susan Sontag on Writing

“There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.”

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)