fightwithknives:

1. Just like you didn’t see 27 Dresses when it came out, begin avoiding 95% of writing that uses personal pronouns, which means almost everything online. It doesn’t matter if it’s written by someone you’ve met in real life, or in a publication you’ve read any liked before. If it’s someone who claims “my ‘I’ gives me transparency,” they are playing football and you want to be watching Nadal. Their way is not wrong, but it’s certainly not to your taste.
2. If there’s no flow or style, don’t bother with that either.
3. Also, collect a blacklist of bylines and URLs that make you angry, and avoid them, too. Sure it’s Nixonian, but it will also help you write more about things you care about writing about… rather than writing about things that piss you off.
4. Reading work that pisses you off doesn’t help you “see what’s out there” because it’s really easy to see what’s out there with a glance, and not an in-depth engagement.
5. The internet systems of writing suck. It’s a forced pissoff economy. Go to Slate and Salon and read “why x is ying z” or “the 8 people who give you reasons to hate everything” or any other “cliffhanger clickthrough” headlines and ignore all of them. Write down the number of times per month you learn anything from one of those stories. (It’s zero, or maybe one.) There’s no worthy payoff from a cliffhanger, just write a hook. A cliffhanger is not a hook. A cliffhanger lacks the style and intrigue of a complex detail or imperfect theme.
6. There is joy joy joy everywhere amid all the bullshit and your job is to find the joy in the bullshit, even when the joy is just in the craft of it, even if you are reporting on it, find the fucking joy, and the joy is not in yourself, writers are conduits not subjects, or at least writers make joy by constructing it within the worst of situations. “Joy” in this context is not so much “happiness” as “exuberance.”
7. It feels good to write sentences like the sentences in point 6, but keep them on your blog and not in your serious writing.
8. The best cure for bad internet is making your own thing that is not a response to another thing but building your own whatever. 
9. Stop reading bad writing. Keep writing good writing.

27 Dresses was on television earlier and I did a great job not even flipping over to it just for a second, and I did this by handing off the remote to my brother, who immediately found an episode of American Pickers. Then we spent about a half hour doing impressions of Mike Wolfe. Sam was a tough negotiatior. I was starting to get a little nervous but then I saw that sign. Wow!!!! Seems like my day is really looking up.

After reading the above list I closed three tabs. I’d had them open since before dinner. Before dinner I was reading some stuff that was making me very angry, and that’s funny because earlier today I didn’t even know this stuff existed. It’s a good thing dinner came when it did because I was starting to think dark thoughts about how I don’t understand how the Internet got so big and how all of you people got on it because last time I checked it was just me and a bunch of nerds and now it’s still us plus a lot of people being dicks to each other over made-up problems, and I’m not interested rar rar rar. But still I had those tabs open so I must have been a little interested. Except I can do better than that. 

Hopefully this does not put me in violation of #1, or maybe it does, but fortunately #7, so I’m fine.