One Weird Trick for Writing Prose

Writing about writing is a sin, ( Writing about writing about writing is doubly so. The road to hell is paved in recursion. ) but I've stumbled upon this One Weird Trick that has helped me write long-form where I was once paralyzed. I've been using it for several months now to great success.

The trick is simple. All the HTML for this blog is written manually in Emacs—mainly because I'm a pathological control freak—but it has the added benefit that line breaks must be added explicitly. I can split my writing into as many lines as I want, and they all get squished into a single paragraph.

<p>
  If you were to view
  the source for this page,
  you would see
  something like this.

  Clauses split out
  onto separate lines,
  like one long prose poem

  (in the biz,
  this is called "enjambment").
</p>

I'm no poet, but lining up words into beat-like patterns helps give my writing a sense of rhythm, and I can naturally vary my sentence length with long and short stanzas. Also, in a code editor it's really easy to shift lines around, so I can play with different syntax. I tend to fuss over these things.

If you're not a huge nerd, this trick works (somewhat) with Markdown too, but two line breaks creates a new paragraph.

There is an awkward workaround
if you want to avoid this:
Include a backslash between stanzas
\
like this.

You can try it out now at markdownlivepreview.com.

This trick works best if you've already read some poems and have a sense of what you like and don't like, but in the absence of this you can always read your writing aloud and see how it feels. Give it a try.