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  • Don’t set aside time for writing, but rather panic every couple of weeks about how little you write. Once every few months, publish an apologetic post about how you haven’t written for ages and tell your friends you have ’something in the pipeline’. Over time, the frequency of these crises will diminish and normalise.

  • Only read books when you get into bed at night after a long day’s work, ensuring that you read no more than a couple of pages before falling asleep and forgetting what you just read. Re-read the same pages the following night. Repeat ad nihil profectus.

  • Intersperse your writing with Latin phrases to make yourself sound intelligent and alienate your audience.

  • Each time you sit down to write a blog post, you should actually be fiddling with bits of code on your site. Every six months you should move your entire site to the blogging platform du jour, then write a post about the migration process.

  • Never carry any form of physical writing material, so that should an idea come to mind, you’ll have time to forget it while you mess around on your phone waiting for Evernote to load.

  • Any opportunity that could be used by your subconscious for introspection and reflective thought should be quashed. For example, instead of staring out the window on a train journey, try rejecting hundreds of eligible life-partners on Tinder.

  • Worry constantly about what other people think of your writing. History has proven that the quality of an author’s writing is directly proportional to its popularity and click-through rate.

  • Stick primarily to writing about topics you don’t understand or have any real interest in. Compensate for lack of veracity and vehemence by being overly verbose, by using words like veracity and vehemence, and with gratuitous use of alliteration.