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One of the most helpful things I’ve read about writing is by Peter Elbow in his book Writing with Power. He observed from his own struggles with writing that the problem he had was having too many ideas at once. “Blocked writers suffer from too many ideas more often than too few.” I picture the image of trying to type too fast on a typewriter and the keys getting jammed together.

I am feeling some of that as I try to approach writing down the ideas bouncing around from my first few weeks of grad school. (Mixing metaphors, but these ideas do seem more like bouncing balls in an model of an excited gas, rather than typewriter keys.)

One of the main things to learn about writing is how to eventually focus on one idea at a time, in each paper and in each paragraph.

A page with some ideas about writing from Peter Elbow

I’m remembering this writing advice from a book of quotes about writing by Ernest Hemingway:

Ordinarily I never read anything before I write in the morning to try to bite on the old nail with no help and no influence and no one giving you a wonderful example or sitting looking over your shoulder.

- from Ernest Hemingway on Writing

I was surprised to learned that Hemingway who had such a distinctive and strong voice felt he needed to avoid other voices in order to record his own.

A teenager known as a troublemaker at school starts to do well in an after-school program–then suddenly gets in trouble.

I worked on a draft of an article this morning called The Trouble with Doing Well.