The Eight Principles at a Glance

1. Begin with purpose

Stay connected to why the Work matters. Purpose helps you choose, and it doesn’t have to be perfectly certain to do that.

2. Protect the unfinished

Give drafts privacy and room to change, uncertainty included. Decide on purpose when to share or process them.

3. Discover freely; structure deliberately

Use discovery to create knowledge and structure to make decisions. Plotter, discovery-writer, and hybrid practices are different arrangements of the two. None is more legitimate than the others.

4. Treat the Work as a connected whole

Manuscript, ideas, entities, sources, revisions, editions, and reader promises belong to one authored system.

5. Keep the author sovereign

Tools assist; the author decides. Context, judgment, acceptance, attribution, privacy, and publication stay in the author’s hands.

6. Revise with intent and evidence

Revise to answer a need you can name, with some way to tell whether the Work got better.

7. Publish with control and consequence

Release exactly the artifact you intended, with the rights, identity, format, audience, and distribution conditions known.

8. Build a body of work, not a content feed

Let each Work leave behind knowledge, assets, systems, rights, reader relationships, and capability for the next.