# The Eight Principles at a Glance

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Canonical URL: https://inkagai.com/the-inkagai-way/read/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.

---

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

This digital book is free to read and download for personal use. You may share the canonical public link and quote brief passages with attribution. You may not resell the book, remove attribution, or distribute modified copies as official editions.

To quote: use up to 100 words at a time, and no more than 300 words in total from this book in any one article, post, or work. Credit both authors by name, as on the title page: Anna Lishman and Brad Lishman, *The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life*, `https://inkagai.com/the-inkagai-way`. Do not credit one author alone, and do not edit a quotation without marking the change. Longer excerpts, translations, audio editions, and adaptations need written permission through `https://inkagai.com/contact`.

Writers quoted or discussed in this book keep every right in their own work. Their words appear here as brief quotation for commentary and teaching; they are not licensed for reuse by this notice. Quote them from their own books and cite those. No writer named here is affiliated with, or endorses, Inkagai or this book.

Canonical home: `https://inkagai.com/the-inkagai-way`