<p>The blank page is not waiting for your best sentence. It is waiting for any sentence.</p><p>I used to open a draft and try to write the opening line the way it would appear in print. Twenty minutes later I had three words and a growing suspicion that I had nothing to say. The fix was humiliating in its simplicity: write the bad version, all the way to the end, and refuse to look back until it is finished.</p><h2>Why the bad draft works</h2><p>A first draft is not a small version of the finished piece. It is a different object entirely. Its only job is to find out what you actually think, and thinking happens on the page, not before it.</p><p>Once the shape exists, editing becomes a craft problem instead of an existential one. You are no longer asking whether you have an idea. You are asking which paragraph to cut.</p><h2>A practical rule</h2><p>Give yourself one uninterrupted stretch, no more than forty minutes, and do not use the delete key. Whatever survives that session is raw material. Come back the next morning and be ruthless.</p>

The case for writing badly first

<p>Most typeface regret comes from picking a face for how it looks in a specimen rather than how it behaves in a paragraph.</p><h2>Four questions</h2><p><strong>How long is the longest thing anyone will read?</strong> A face that sparkles in a headline can be exhausting across nine hundred words.</p><p><strong>What sizes does it need to survive?</strong> Check the smallest label and the largest heading in the same sitting.</p><p><strong>How many weights do you genuinely need?</strong> Two is usually enough. Three is a luxury. Five is a decision you have not made yet.</p><p><strong>Does it have the characters your content needs?</strong> Accents, currency symbols, real quotation marks. Nothing undermines a careful layout like a missing glyph.</p><p>Answer those honestly and the shortlist tends to write itself.</p>

Notes on choosing a typeface

<p>Sitting with a problem past the point of usefulness is a habit, not a virtue.</p><p>When a piece stalls, I print it, read it once, and then leave without it. Somewhere in the second half of the walk the answer arrives, and it is almost always a cut rather than an addition. The distance is what makes the redundancy visible.</p><h2>Make it deliberate</h2><p>Do not bring headphones and do not bring a plan. The point is to let the draft run in the background while your attention is somewhere else. Keep a note app handy for the one sentence you will inevitably want to catch.</p><p>Then come home and do the surgery while the clarity is still warm.</p>

Walking as an editing tool

<p>Every object in view is a small open question. Do I need this. Should I finish that. Where does this go.</p><p>The tidiest people I know are not neat by temperament, they are protecting their concentration. They keep the surface in front of them almost bare, and everything else within arm's reach but out of sight.</p><h2>The half-empty rule</h2><p>If the bench is more than half covered, stop and clear it before starting anything new. It costs four minutes and buys back an hour of unbroken attention.</p><p>The same rule works on a desktop, in a project folder, and in a draft with too many half-written sections.</p>

Short notes on writing, design, and the habits that hold them up.

Latest writing

The case for writing badly first

Notes on choosing a typeface

Walking as an editing tool

Keep the workbench half empty