Regret is the Skin You Shed Just to Make It This Far

Director Wake? More likely than you think

This is the best advice anybody can give you, but it's not fun and it's shitty to execute: the only way to get better at writing is to write a lot.

I'm not going to say that there aren't people who have a better intuitive capability at writing than others, but no matter how much innate talent someone may have, nothing will ever take the place of the journeyman grind of writing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages. From the first story I ever wrote to the last one I churned out, the difference is immense -- and while yes, I've grown in experience, vocabulary, literary reference and maturity, the only way I was able to deploy those new tools and refinements was by continuously throwing myself bloody against the brick wall of writing yet another story.

The best way to be a good writer is to be a bad writer for a very long time, in essence, and to be able to grit your teeth through that process. That last part, the endurance sport of it, that's the thing a lot of people can't do; even once you're a quote-unquote good writer, writing doesn't get much easier, because you hold yourself to a higher standard, and chipping blood out of the rock of your frontal lobe so your story can have a climax is the same agonizing process it's ever been -- regardless of how you avoid thesaurus abuse these days.

Re: the realism and atmosphere, I regret to send you to Elon Musk's twitter, but I wrote a long thread about my process there years ago, which now I'm thinking I should probably transcribe into Tumblr at some point.

my fetish

my friend's fetish

How Marshall deals with Monday Upper Management Meeting.