The Saboteur has many faces: Attacker, Enticer, Innocent, Protector and Unlucky. Different routes to the same goal — to block our writing. Just when we think we’ve figured out how to identify the Saboteur and avoid the roadblocks it sets up, it morphs into a different form and uses different techniques to invade our thinking. […]
Archive | 2017
What Rejection Really Means to Writers
How much pain will you endure to bring your writing into readers’ hands? Writers don’t have to suffer for our art, but we do have to endure rejection along the way. And rejection hurts. Literally. Neurological research demonstrates that social exclusion and physical pain trigger the same type of activity in the anterior cingulate and […]
Writers Arm Yourselves with Resistance Fighting Tools: Guest Post by Dave Chesson
I’m pleased to introduce author and entrepreneur Dave Chesson as this week’s guest blogger. When Dave’s not light saber dueling with little jedi or sipping tea with princesses, he tests new book marketing tactics and helps authors improve their book sales. On his blog Kindlepreneur.com, Dave explains that he spent more than $15,000 in […]
How to Enter the Writer’s Trance
To discover a story, writers use a different kind of cognitive activity and enter a different state of consciousness. Whether we call it the writer’s trance, creative flow, flow writing, freewriting, dreamstorming or the awakened dream, it’s where most writers find creative bliss. The writer’s trance is notoriously illusive, but you can enhance your ability […]
The Creative Power of NOT Writing
In a previous post, I promised to explain why you should “keep your butt on the meditation cushion or your back on the yoga mat” in the early stages of writing. There is power is resisting the urge to write. I learned the value of delayed drafting at a writer’s conference decades ago. One of […]
New Book Update: It’s Done!
Drum roll, please… I finished rewriting my novel on August 15, 2017! Again. If you’re a long-time reader of this blog or have looked at the New Book Updates in the archive, you may recall that I finished a significant rewrite in October 2015, one year and 10 months after I pulled my novel off […]
“Meditating” Your Way into Writing
In the previous post, I said that drafting and revising rely on divergent thinking and editing relies on convergent thinking. It’s a weeny bit more complex. In Off the Page (2008 edited by Carole Burns), Richard Bausch says this about beginning a book: “I start writing with an image or a voice, but I don’t […]
What Kind of Meditation Does Your Writing Need? Depends on What Stage It’s In
In my previous post, I suggested that writers need to alternate between focused-attention meditation and open-monitoring meditation. In some stages of the creative process, we need divergent thinking, which open-monitoring meditation increases. In other stages, we need convergent thinking, which focused-attention meditation increases. (More about stages of the creative process in Chapter 4 of AWB) […]
What Kind of Meditation Do Writers Need?
Based on the secondary research I’ve done and personal experience, I know meditation is good, in a whole slew of ways, for our brains including enhancing creativity. Clearly, it matters that writers meditate. It didn’t occur to me that how we meditate might also matter. Research by cognitive psychologist Lorenza Colzato’s demonstrates that different kinds […]
Do Writers Need to Keep Our Butts in the Chair?
In 1937, Sinclair Lewis shared his version of an often repeated and often reworded bit of writerly wisdom: And as the recipe for writing, all writing, I remember no high-flown counsel but always and only Mary Heaton Vorse’s jibe, delivered to a bunch of young and mostly incompetent hopefuls back in 1911: ‘The art of […]
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Bane of Your Resistance 