It is finished! The last chapter of the rewrite of my novel The Essential Path is drafted, tweaked and imported into Scrivener. My target dates did work. I didn’t hit them all exactly as planned, but they kept me in the ballpark. I finished the last chapter today, right on the target date I set. … More New Book Update: The Rewrite is Finished!
Hypergraphia is the compulsion to write. While I don’t have a clinical case of hypergraphia, typically caused by brain disorders, my desire to work on my novel rewrite has grown progressively more intense in the past two weeks. This morning, I drafted the two penultimate chapters! I had to push myself to stop drafting today … More New Book Update: What’s the Opposite of Writer’s Block?
My last post explained why writing prompts work and provided links for finding them. You can also create your own creative constraints via the Random Scene Generator, a tool I introduced several years ago in what has become my most viewed post. I created the Random Scene Generator (RSG) as a birthday present for a … More Random Writing Prompts to Solve Writer’s Block
Too much freedom is paralyzing. The invitation to “write anything you want” is too open-ended. We can’t start because we don’t where to start. On the other hand, being told exactly what to write and how creates the “don’t tell me what to do” opposition response. Writing prompts work because they hit that sweet spot … More Why Writing Prompts Work
Claudia and I are nearly at the end of “Weddingarama.” We fly out tomorrow morning to celebrate a milestone birthday for my mom and to attend the last of six weddings in eight weeks (these last three weddings in three weeks). It is an honor it is to witness the most important day of our … More Today I Make Time to Write!
Does your writing have to settle for the dregs of your time and attention? It is always shoved into last place in the queue? If you frequently delay your writing because you’re bouncing from one urgency to another, your writing is the victim of the Urgency Bully. You can fight back! You can give your … More Is Your Writing Important Enough to Fight the Urgency Bully?
The metaphor of constipation for writer’s block has been around for a long time… Back in 1992, Clarissa Pinkola Estés talked about creative constipation in her audio recording The Creative Fire (Sounds True). She defined creativity as psychic excrement that we all naturally produce and need to express daily. Otherwise psychic toxins build up, and voilà, … More How to Cure Creative Constipation, aka Writer’s Block
Your big writing dream – a novel, short story collection, memoir, screenplay, chapbook, publishing a piece in a publication you admire or consistently posting to your blog – is your mountain. You can spend all your time staring up at the mountain, marveling at how high it is, how dangerous the weather looks, how amazing … More What’s Your Writing Mountain?
I’ve been reading Deb Norton’s blog PartWild for a couple of years and I always find myself nodding along with her insights. We resonate. So I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you who follow BaneOfYourResistance also follow PartWild. When I read “The More You Don’t Get Eaten by a Tiger,” I nodded so vigorously, … More The More You Don’t Get Eaten by a Tiger: Guest Post by Deb Norton
It may be that what you think of as writer’s block or resistance is simply the result of forsaking writing by hand. To support that conclusion, I wanted to quote at least half of a NYT article about how losing handwriting affects learning and brain function. I decided instead to simply send you there to … More Pick Up Your Pen and Put Down Writer’s Block
Bane of Your Resistance 