Writing from the Heart: The Best Writing Takes Hours, not Weeks
Whenever I have some time on vacation, I like to write something about my current interest, without much planning, writing the article within a couple of hours (vs. days and weeks I usually spend).
It’s a challenge, but intersting enough; they seem to strike a chord. Whenever I do that and land on Hacker News (my last two, at least). This also happens today with my latest article about « Finding Flow».
There’s a trigger that makes me sit down and just write it. This time, the trigger was the book about Stolen Focus.
I believe this is because when we write fast, we write from the heart. Sometimes, we are angry, or something bothered us over time. Instead of spending “only” a few hours on it, my brain and my subconscious have usually wrestled with it for many days and months. Maybe plain intuition?
# The Phenomen
I’m really interested in this phenomenon of writing straight from the heart. This act itself is an art of flow. Perhaps I will write about it in the following rant :)
It boils down to:
Writing from the heart is the best—true, honest, and genuine human-to-human communication.
# Struggle and Flow of Writing
I love how Jason Fried said it, he does not call it writing from the heart, but writing from a single flow:
For me, when I struggle with writing, it’s a signal to stop writing, not to keep pushing through the writing
You don’t have to struggle through writing, he says:
What’s the point of struggling? There’s some point of struggling in other things, I think like, certain things we’re struggling through; for me, writing is not worth struggling through, it’s worth finding a flow, because then you can ride that ^d82701
# Further Reads
Origin: Steal like an artist Trilogy (Austin Kleon)
References: Writing from a Scar, Intuition, Flow, Art