Highlights From candyforbreakfast.email

My own note-taking “system” is extremely minimal and stupid. It consists of roughly 2,000 completely unorganized entries in my iPhone notes app, stretching back thirteen years. These could be, among other things: an interesting fact I learned, an idea for an essay, something funny one of my friends said, a dream I had, a shopping list from 2011, or a weird name I made up.

Outside of highly specialized contexts like writing an academic paper or studying for a test, most note-taking is, at best, a waste of time. You won’t become a better writer or a more creative person by building up a huge personal library of organized notes. In fact, doing so is likely to be counterproductive

My number one piece of writing advice—really, my only piece of writing advice—is that basically everything that isn’t writing, revising, or editing is a waste of time. This is especially true for beginners, who are prone to procrastination in the guise of planning

The best writing comes when you sit down with a pen and paper and something just starts pouring out. When something doesn’t just start pouring out (which, let’s face it, is most of the time), the most reliable trick is to consult a prompt, or to force yourself to write and discard a bunch of nonsense until you feel the faucet start to warm up

People often look at my large collection of books, or see the articles I tweet about, and ask, how do you remember everything you read? And the answer is, I don’t. Remembering is for chumps. I’m not reading to remember, I’m reading to be influenced. It all goes into the big, messy bucket that is my mind, and I trust that enough of it will be retained and mixed together, and emerge later. Sometimes in distorted or misremembered form, perhaps, but that just makes it all the more worthwhile. Much creativity comes from mistakes