# The 100 Practices at a Glance

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

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## Part 1 — Practice and attention

1. **Make Beginning Ordinary.** Write often enough that beginning becomes ordinary.
2. **Shrink the Doorway.** Make each session small enough to start and substantial enough to matter.
3. **Build a Practice That Does Not Need Inspiration.** Inspiration is welcome; routine is dependable.
4. **Give Yourself Something to Fix.** A poor page is raw material; an unwritten page is not.
5. **Finish Enough to Learn From Endings.** Finish enough work to learn what endings teach.
6. **Protect the Conditions.** Protect the conditions that let you write.
7. **Read for Cause.** Read widely for range and closely for cause.
8. **Stop Treating Resistance as Prophecy.** Treat resistance as part of the process, not as a verdict on the work.
9. **Let Confidence Follow Evidence.** Confidence usually follows evidence of practice.
10. **Notice What the World Has Stopped Seeing.** Pay attention: what others overlook is often where the work begins.

## Part 2 — Material, purpose, and form

11. **Save the Fragment Before Explaining It.** Capture fragments before demanding that they explain themselves.
12. **Trade Generality for Particularity.** Specificity makes invented worlds credible and factual worlds intelligible.
13. **Gather More Than You Use.** Gather generously; select ruthlessly.
14. **Let Curiosity Precede Certainty.** Write from curiosity until the work earns certainty.
15. **Find the Subject Beneath the Topic.** Distinguish the topic from the subject: what a work depicts is not always what it is about.
16. **Define the Reader’s Change.** Know what experience, understanding, or change you are promising the reader.
17. **Let the Material Choose Its Container.** Choose the form the material needs, not the form with the most prestige.
18. **Treat Genre as a Conversation.** Genre creates expectations; use, bend, or break them knowingly.
19. **Know Whether You Are Testing or Arguing.** A premise tests a possibility; a thesis defends a claim.
20. **Let Theme Happen Through Consequence.** Theme is enacted through patterns of choice and consequence, not announced as a lesson.

## Part 3 — Planning and structure

21. **Plan Until You Can Move.** Outline until you can move; draft until you discover what the outline missed.
22. **Treat the Outline as a Hypothesis.** Treat every plan as a hypothesis, not a contract.
23. **Every Writer Discovers Somewhere.** Discovery writers find structure through drafting; planners test structure through drafting.
24. **Build Causes, Not Just Calendars.** Organize by causality when causality matters, not by chronology alone.
25. **Diagnose the Missing Pressure.** When stuck, look for an unanswered question, an absent desire, or a weak consequence.
26. **Write Out of Order Without Losing the Whole.** Write out of order when useful, but track dependencies.
27. **Leave a Marker and Keep Moving.** Use placeholders to preserve momentum.
28. **Outline What You Actually Wrote.** Reverse-outline the draft to see the work you actually made.
29. **Arrange Pressure, Information, and Change.** Structure is the arrangement of pressure, information, and change across time.
30. **Make Each Part Affect Another.** Each part should create necessity for what follows or alter the meaning of what came before.

## Part 4 — Character, narrator, and point of view

31. **Give Desire Competition.** Character begins with desire and deepens through competing desires.
32. **Apply Pressure Before Explaining Character.** Pressure reveals priorities.
33. **Make Contradiction Coherent.** Contradiction becomes depth only when it arises from coherent motives.
34. **Activate the Past.** Backstory matters when it changes present choice, perception, or stakes.
35. **Let Supporting Characters Exist Offstage.** Give every major character a private logic and a life beyond the protagonist’s needs.
36. **Give Opposition a Worldview.** Antagonism should be persuasive from within its own logic.
37. **Use Point of View as an Information System.** Point of view controls access, emphasis, blindness, and suspense.
38. **Control the Camera’s Distance.** Change narrative distance deliberately.
39. **Remember That Narrators Select.** A narrator is never transparent; selection itself creates meaning.
40. **Separate the Selves of Memoir.** In memoir, distinguish the experiencing self, the remembering self, and the narrating self.

## Part 5 — Scene and narrative movement

41. **Make the Situation Different by the End.** A scene begins with an unstable condition and ends with a changed one.
42. **Enter at the Pressure Point.** Enter where the pressure begins; leave once the consequence lands.
43. **Give the Scene More Than One Job.** Every scene should earn its place through action, revelation, transformation, or resonance.
44. **Define Conflict as Incompatible Intention.** Conflict is incompatible intention under constraint.
45. **Let Coincidence Create Trouble.** Coincidence may begin trouble; it should rarely solve it.
46. **Escalate the Cost, Not Only the Noise.** Escalation increases cost, uncertainty, complexity, or irreversibility.
47. **Make Turns Change the Field.** A true turn changes a goal, a fact, a relationship, a balance of power, or the field of possibility.
48. **Connect Promises to Payoffs.** Setup creates expectation; payoff rewards, complicates, or overturns it.
49. **Pace Anticipation, Event, and Reflection.** Pacing is the management of anticipation, event, and reflection.
50. **Resolve the Governing Movement.** An ending should resolve the work’s central movement, even when it leaves questions open.

## Part 6 — Language, voice, and style

51. **Choose the Word That Knows What It Means.** Prefer the exact word to the impressive word.
52. **Put Weight on Nouns and Verbs.** Let strong nouns and verbs carry the sentence, then add texture deliberately.
53. **Make Complexity Followable.** Clarity does not simplify thought; it makes complexity followable.
54. **Recognize Style as Repetition.** Style is the pattern formed by repeated choices.
55. **Find Voice in Attention.** Voice comes from recurring habits of attention, judgment, rhythm, and omission.
56. **Let Syntax Think.** Sentence length and syntax regulate energy, emphasis, and thought.
57. **Use the Mouth as an Editing Tool.** Read prose aloud; the ear detects false emphasis, monotony, and strain.
58. **Give Abstraction a Body.** Concrete detail gives abstraction somewhere to stand.
59. **Make Metaphor Discover.** Metaphor should discover a relationship, not display cleverness.
60. **Remove Competitive Flourishes.** Cut any flourish that competes with the sentence’s real work.

## Part 7 — Dialogue, exposition, poetry, and dramatic form

61. **Make Dialogue Do Something.** Dialogue is action conducted through language.
62. **Write the Unsaid Conversation.** Let subtext carry what speakers cannot or will not say.
63. **Differentiate Minds Before Accents.** Distinct voices differ in syntax, vocabulary, rhythm, assumptions, and desire—not accent alone.
64. **Do Not Stage a Conversation for the Reader’s Convenience.** Do not make characters explain what everyone in the scene already knows.
65. **Dramatize the Necessary Experience.** Dramatize what the reader must experience; summarize what the reader must traverse.
66. **Make Exposition Change Something.** Exposition earns its place when it changes understanding, pressure, or expectation.
67. **Write for the Medium.** In drama and screenwriting, write what can be performed, heard, or seen.
68. **Hear Meaning Before Explaining It.** In poetry, sound, line, image, syntax, and silence all make meaning.
69. **Use Constraint to Remove the Obvious.** Constraint can generate invention by removing easy choices.
70. **Increase Pressure Through Compression.** Compression increases the work carried by each word, image, beat, or scene.

## Part 8 — Nonfiction, research, and truth

71. **Label the Kind of Knowing.** Separate observation, testimony, inference, memory, and speculation.
72. **Match Evidence to Consequence.** Match the strength of the evidence to the importance and uncertainty of the claim.
73. **Challenge the Convenient Source.** Corroborate most aggressively what you are eager to believe.
74. **Strengthen the Opposition Before Answering It.** Represent opposing arguments in terms their strongest relevant advocates would recognize.
75. **Shape Facts Without Distorting Them.** Narrative structure may shape facts, but it must not falsify their relationships.
76. **Resist False Neatness.** Do not improve reality into false neatness.
77. **Preserve Quotation Integrity.** Quote faithfully and preserve context and provenance.
78. **State Uncertainty Precisely.** State uncertainty precisely rather than disguising it as authority.
79. **Treat Real People as Participants in Consequence.** Real people are subjects with rights and consequences, not merely material.
80. **Increase Care With Vulnerability.** The greater the subject’s vulnerability and the possible harm, the greater the writer’s duty of care.

## Part 9 — Revision, editing, and feedback

81. **Discover First, Decide Later.** Draft to discover possibilities; revise to choose among them.
82. **Revise From the Outside In.** Revise in descending scale: purpose, structure, sections or scenes, paragraphs, sentences, then words.
83. **Do Not Polish the Unsettled.** Do not polish passages whose function is still unsettled.
84. **Cut the Good That Harms the Whole.** Cut what is good when it prevents the whole from becoming better.
85. **Trace Repetition to Its Source.** Repeated local problems usually indicate a structural cause.
86. **Diagnose Before Rewriting.** Diagnose the problem before rewriting the prose.
87. **Treat Feedback as Reader Data.** Feedback reports a reader’s experience; it does not dictate the remedy.
88. **Investigate Conflicting Expectations.** When readers disagree, identify the different promises they thought the Work made.
89. **Preserve History Without Negotiating With It.** Preserve earlier versions, but revise the current manuscript decisively.
90. **Name the Editorial Layer.** Revision changes meaning and effect; copyediting corrects expression; proofreading verifies production.

## Part 10 — Completion and the writing life

91. **Finish According to Purpose.** A work is finished not when nothing can change, but when further changes no longer serve its governing purpose.
92. **Create Distance Before Diagnosis.** Leave time between drafting and diagnosis when circumstances allow.
93. **Work at One Scale at a Time.** Work on one scale of the manuscript at a time.
94. **Learn the Form Before Breaking It.** Learn the conventions of a form before breaking them on purpose.
95. **Preserve Difficulty, Remove Needless Confusion.** Protect the reader from needless confusion, not from difficulty.
96. **Accept the Reader’s Authority Over Interpretation.** Publication transfers control of interpretation to readers.
97. **Interpret Rejection Narrowly.** Rejection is evidence about fit, timing, and reception—not a final verdict on quality.
98. **Build a Practice for Every Season.** Build a practice that can survive success, failure, deadlines, and ordinary life.
99. **Extend Judgment Without Surrendering It.** Use tools, editors, and collaborators to extend judgment, not replace it.
100. **Release What Fear Is Holding.** Release the work when further delay protects fear more than craft.

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Copyright © Anna Lishman and Brad Lishman. Published by Inkagai, an Algodyne Corporation product.

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