In this post Scott Alexander offers fifteen (and a half) short pieces of writing advice, framed as compensation for missing the first half of Lighthaven's second Inkhaven — a month-long bootcamp where aspiring bloggers must publish a post a day or get kicked out. Dispensed in his characteristic voice, with the usual asides, jokes, and passing metaphors, the collection ranges across questions of craft, style, structure, and reader attention, aimed at anyone trying to work out why some writing lands and other writing merely happens.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 00:43 - 1: Against microdishonesty
* 03:59 - 2: Avoid cliches like the plague
* 06:13 - 3: Disciplines to do on a mountaintop for thirty years
* 10:02 - 4: Untangle your sentences
* 13:19 - 5: Against explainers
* 16:46 - 6: The Traditional Five Paragraph Essay
* 19:36 - 7: Against the blogosphere
* 22:54 - 8: Watching paint dry
* 25:38 - 9: “Where do you get your ideas?”
* 26:18 - 10: There are effortposts everywhere for those eyes to see
* 30:20 - 11: In partial, extremely grudging praise of Mikhail Samin
* 33:38 - 12: The purpose of poetry
* 36:36 - 13: Runway
* 38:13 - 14: Conflict and curiosity
* 40:36 - 15: What can’t the reader trivially regenerate from a prompt?
* 43:02 - 15.5: Just say the thing you want to say
