Transition — From Principles to Practices

A principle tells you what you are trying to protect, then leaves you alone with the page, and most writing advice goes wrong in that gap. Advice that stays at the level of principle changes nothing, while advice that jumps to procedure turns one writer’s habits into everyone’s rules.

Each of the hundred practices begins from a principle but is written as a small act, something specific to notice, try or decide, with a limit on how long it should take and a way to tell whether it worked. Each is a bounded experiment, never a rule, and each says where it stops helping, because nearly every piece of craft advice that has helped one writer has, somewhere, hurt another.

The practices are grouped in ten parts, in roughly the order a Work asks for them, from attention and beginning to completion and the writing life. That order is a convenience. A discovery writer may need revision and feedback in Part 9 before planning and structure in Part 3. A memoirist stuck on whether she is allowed to tell a story may need Practice 40 and nothing more for a month.

Skip what doesn’t fit the work in front of you; a mismatch says nothing against the practice, or against you. Each chapter stands alone, and where one leans on another it cites it by number, “Practice 12” for one of the hundred and “Chapter 3” for one of the nine chapters before this one.

Nobody is meant to follow all hundred. Keep the few that make your next page easier to write and your last page easier to judge, and put the rest back on the shelf.