A series of articles by Steve Johnson about “tools and strategies” for the writing life prompted Alan Jacobs to notice a deeper problem would-be writers tend to ignore:
[L]et me encourage you to look again at Johnson’s posts. He tells you how to “keep your hunches alive,” how to use e-book annotations, how to keep researching as you write, and so on. All very good in its way. But: What if your ideas are crap? What good does it do — for you or the world — if you are clever and efficient in communicating thoughts that are carelessly arrived at, or ill-formed and incompletely worked through, or utterly unimaginative repetitions of what people in your would-be peer group have already said? … [I]f you want to do really good work, intellectually and/or artistically substantive work, then your first question can never be “How do I express my ideas?” but rather “How can I acquire ideas that are worthy of being expressed?”
In a follow-up post, Jacobs takes a stab at the latter question, imploring writers, “get out of your comfort zone, your echo chamber”:
But don’t do so by seeking out the crowd-pleasers and rabble-rousers from outside your typical group (unless you’re trying to understand sociological phenomena). If you’re a conservative who wants to understand liberalism, don’t bother with Michael Moore; if you’re a liberal who wants to understand conservatism, don’t bother with Sarah Palin; if you’re an unbeliever who’s curious about Christianity, ignore Joel Osteen; if you’re an orthodox Christian trying to get a fix on atheism, steer clear of Bill Maher.
If you seek out what’s strange to you in its better expressions, several things will happen. First of all, you’ll court being changed by the encounter, having your views altered, perhaps in significant ways. You’ll learn that the people who disagree with you are almost certainly, taken as a whole, morally and intellectually the equal of the people you agree with. … You’ll probably come to realize that any question that is fiercely debated is fiercely debated because there aren’t simple and obvious answers to it. … [I]f you want to have thoughts worth expressing, you’re going to have to take the risk of being slowed down and even seriously altered.
The Dish 