The biggest predictor of whether any project I start goes well or whether I can complete any goal I set myself is almost always whether I’m able to keep working on it until it’s done, or whether I get excited about something new and jump into starting that.

Letting unfinished projects you were once enthusiastic about pile up is a bad idea for a few reasons.

1. If you only work on things during the initial burst of energy and novelty, you don’t strengthen the skill of persevering to the end. …

Recently, I started trying to loosely organise by topic the tangled array of notes I collect in both my physical notebooks, in Google Docs, and different notes apps. I gather these from books, blog posts, songs, tweets, Wikipedia pages, news articles, forum posts, things people say, and ideas that drift into my brain.

So I’m sharing a few posts compiling notes on different topics. I’ll aim to update each post every so often as I collect more on the same theme.

Here are some of my favourite notes on editing and other ways of improving your writing quality. …

Recently, I started using Bear to organise the tangled array of notes I collect in both my physical notebooks, in Google Docs, and different notes apps. I gather these from books, blog posts, songs, tweets, Wikipedia pages, news articles, forum posts, things people say, and ideas that drift into my brain.

Now, they’re loosely organised on my laptop, each with a title summarising its main idea, so I can pull them up at will for inspiration. I’ve used Evernote as a central repository for notes for a while but wanted something less unwieldy with more flexible organisation. …

July was my last month in London and it ended up being the nicest time during my 1.5 years in the city. As is always the case. Things began to reopen in the last few weeks so it was exciting to do normal things again, like using public transport, seeing some of my favourite paintings, and taking a day trip to the beach.

In August, I began the process of moving to Berlin so most of my time since then has been consumed by apartment hunting, paperwork, trying to learn passable German, and general attempts to adjust. …

Many writing prompts or pieces of advice for those sitting down with the compulsion to write but no clear starting point in mind, boil down to: tell us where it hurts.

Begin there. Then follow the hurt until you get to something beautiful. Or redemptive. Or at least complete. Maybe even profound.

Hurt is a good starting point for writing. Not because pain has any intrinsic value or intrigue. Most pain is boring and unexceptional. Everybody hurts much if not most of the time. …

As part of my effort to get back into my own writing projects, I’m exploring a few potential ways of documenting things in the spirit of old-school, journal-style blogging.

To begin, I’ve decided to experiment with posting the goals I set myself each month, updating the post as I make progress, then adding a review at the end of the month. While writing up September’s goals, I started explaining how I set them, then realised it made more sense as a separate post.

So, here’s an attempt to condense and define how I approach goals. This post falls into the category of ‘things I’ve written for my own reference but which might be useful if you’re a reasonably similar person.’ …

‘The creative consequences of his imaginative strivings may never make him whole; but they constitute his deepest consolations and his greatest glories.’ — Anthony Storr, The Dynamics of Creation

In The Dynamics of Creation, psychoanalyst and psychologist Anthony Storr attempts to understand what motivates people to dedicate themselves to creative work. Considering that creativity is a difficult endeavour and often carries few rewards, it has to be about more than fame or money.

Storr believed that for some people, creativity could substitute for unmet needs in the real world. …

‘Bad childhoods have an unfortunate tendency to drive us to seek out situations in which there is a theoretical possibility of receiving outsized approval — which also means, along the way, a high risk of encountering outsized disapproval.’ — How To Overcome Your Childhood, The School of Life

In The Dream House is a memoir of Carmen Maria Machado’s experiences of abuse in a same-sex relationship.

I read it in one sitting. Then I read it again, also in one go.

It’s standard to begin a book review with a summary of its content before talking about what it means and dispensing opinions. This book doesn’t lend itself well to being summarised. Instead, let’s run through a cosmeticized version of the notes I took after reading it and explain the story along the way. …