Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice

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Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice<br>...

Scott Alexander<br>Apr 21, 2026

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This month, rationalist institution Lighthaven is running their second Inkhaven, a bootcamp for aspiring bloggers. Participants have to publish a post a day, or they get kicked out. You can read their posts here.<br>I’m too old to manage that pace, but agreed to participate as an advisor. Then I missed the first half of the month because I was on a trip. As compensation, here are fifteen pieces of writing advice for the fifteen days I was absent.<br>1: Against microdishonesty<br>Sasha Chapin has a piece If You Have Writer’s Block, Maybe Stop Lying To Yourself. Maybe lying gives Sasha writer’s block, but for my last set of mentees it more often just made things sound awkward and unclear. The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn’t naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse.<br>I remember asking one of my mentees to take out a tangential paragraph that didn’t really connect to the rest of the argument. They refused, and awkwardly admitted that it was the one thing they really wanted to say with the essay. They’d written the essay about something else, because the other thing was more presentable. Then they’d smuggled their actual point in as a payload. Clever plan, but your readers will notice.<br>There are countless reasons to lie when you’re writing. Maybe you thought of a clever introduction, but the thing it introduces is 5% different from the thing you really want to say, so you need to be a little vague and smush them together. Maybe you have a great perspective on something which is almost like the topic du jour, and you need to make it sound like it’s exactly the topic du jour to get it published. Maybe you can rebut 99 out of 100 arguments for some stupid evil position that you want to debunk, but it would be embarrassing to leave one hanging, so you smudge it together into the other 99 arguments. English will punish you for all these things. Sometimes there’s no better solution and you have to settle, but your readers will notice.<br>One mentee asked me to fix an autobiographical essay. The first part, about how a certain trauma made them lose faith in humanity, was great. But they wanted help with the second part, on how they worked hard to see the best in everyone and eventually recovered. They couldn’t make it sound right. After some prodding, we diagnosed the problem: their regaining of faith in humanity was still sort of aspirational. They’d tried hard to see the best in people. There had been a few small victories, and some seeds that might grow into something more. But the bulk of their “recovery of faith” section was being driven more by their feeling that, c’mon, you’ve got to have a “recovery of faith” section in an essay like that, than by any real positive feelings. I dunno, man. Maybe you should change all of your verbs to the active voice, I hear that helps.<br>2: Avoid cliches like the plague<br>This is the legally mandated header for any discussion of cliches. The problem is, it means everyone knows that “like the plague” is a cliche, but no one’s sure about anything else. Are the following the sorts of cliches you should be avoiding?<br>“In some sense”

“In the grand scheme of things”

“Once in a blue moon”

“Through diligent practice”

“Comparing apples to apples”

“The arc of history”

“The data say”

“Life hack”

“Would be a good start”

My answer: it doesn’t matter, you will never remove all of these from your writing, and you’ll go crazy if you try, working yourself into a state of hypersensitivity where your fingers start typing “a good start” and then you catch yourself and replace it with “a beneficial beginning” or something equally barbaric. In some sense, in the grand scheme of things, cliches are semantic building blocks, bigger than words but smaller than entire concepts; reject the ones handed to you by past generations, and you will have to build every brick of your edifice from scratch as you go.<br>So what’s left of avoiding cliches like the plague? The ACLTP commandment is usually interpreted as being about deleting the cliche - just say “avoid cliches”! - and this too has its season. But I’ve found it helpful to think of cliches as missed quest hooks - signs that you could have said something really unique and interesting here. What about “Avoid cliches with all the ferocity of Jim Cramer avoiding good stock picks”?<br>If you do this all the time, you’ll either end up cringe or the next Shakespeare, no middle ground. But if you do it once in a blue moon, your writing will get much more interesting.<br>3: Disciplines to do on a mountaintop for thirty years<br>Freshman English class tells you to avoid passive voice. Senior English class tells you that’s garbage, your freshman English teacher was a dunce, Shakespeare or Hemingway or whoever...