Dickie Bush

Dickie Bush (@dickiebush) is a writer and writing teacher on Twitter whose threads on writing habits and online audience-building Kyle saved repeatedly. He is described in saved tweets as one of the people behind the Ship30for30 writing program, and as co-teaching an online writing course, Write the Ship, with Nicolas Cole. A tweet from another account says he grew from 2k to 200k Twitter followers in 18 months through a systematic thread-writing process.

The saved threads fall into a few groups:

• Writing habit and craft. “I spent over 1,000 hours learning to write effectively,” compressed into 11 tweets (the best writing is “a byproduct” of a system, not a result); “7 dead-simple steps to build a daily writing habit”; a six-step path to better writing that links separate guides for habit, idea generation and editing; and 8 books he recommends to new writers, opening with Atomic Habits (James Clear) and The War of Art (Steven Pressfield).
• Ideas to write about. “30 ideas you can write about over the next 30 days,” which sorts all writing into four buckets (actionable, analytical, aspirational, anthropological), and a short content-strategy prompt asking for the mistakes made, time wasted and resources missed in solving one problem.
• Starting out online. A playbook from his first nine months of writing online, beginning January 2020, which warns against building a personal blog nobody knows exists; and a five-step guide to using Twitter well, which tells readers to stop scrolling the home timeline and build Twitter Lists by interest.
• Studying other writers. A breakdown of the 1982 internal memo “How to write” by David Ogilvy, which opens with the line that “the better you write, the higher you will go.”

Other people’s tweets reference his programs as part of their own writing curricula, for example one reader’s January ultralearning plan combining Ship 30 for 30 with Write of Passage and On Writing Well.

Where this appears

• 30 Ideas You Can Write… (tweet)
• 7 Dead-simple Steps to Build… (tweet)
• I Spent Over 1,000 Hours… (tweet)
• If You Use It Right… (tweet)
• In January 2020, I Started… (tweet)
• Looking to Build a Writing… (tweet)
• Most People Suck at Writing… (tweet)
• One of the Most Legendary… (tweet)