Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash
The title is a little harsher than I normally see from Edmund Schubert. He is the nice editor-writer I want to grow up to be, but in the Magical Word article “Sit Down, Shut Up, and Write!” on November 20, 2010, he lays down some solid rules in some no-nonsense language.
- Study is okay. Going to panels, being part of on-line communities, and other ways of learning the business and how to write is okay. But you REALLY want to learn to write – then write.
- Don’t drown yourself in writing-related activity, write.
- Read other people’s books to see what to do and what not to do, and then write.
- Great creatives like Mozart and Shakespeare didn’t write one masterpiece, they wrote hundreds of pieces of which some were masterpieces, quality emerging out of quantity, so write a lot.
- Great inventors like Edison and theorists like Einstein didn’t have just one patent or one theory paper, they had hundreds, producing regularly, therefore write constantly.
- It’s okay if you can’t write daily, or a lot at a time, write when you can and as much as you can when you can. Do the writing.
So Sit Down, Shut Up, and Write.
The comment section on the blog also has some good comments too – the URL is .