When I retired as a creativity coach, I started looking for alternatives. So I...
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How You Do Love Writing?
Are you passionately in love with writing or are you and your writing an old, married couple? When you’re in love, you tingle with passion, desire, excitement. Every moment is an opportunity to discover another fascinating detail about your beloved. Even the risk of being disappointed, rejected or broken-hearted is thrilling. When you love, you’re […]
Want to Write? You Gotta Trust!
Most writer’s resistance can be traced to the fear that we might get hurt. Let me reassure you. You WILL get hurt. Your writing will be flawed. Some people will criticize it and you. More will ignore it. The vast majority of the 7.6 billion people on the planet will never know or care about […]
What Conscious Writers Need to Know About Writer’s Block
Why do you do that? Waste an hour with email or social media? Or find another way to distract yourself away from writing? Why do you wait to write? Or edit the same paragraph again and again? Why is so hard (at times) to do what you love? It might be time for a reminder: […]
Real Writers Power thru the Flu, Right? Wrong!
“Is the flu a good reason to break your habit? That’s what happened to me and I still feel bad about it.” – Tamara, comment on the About this Blog page When you have the flu (or other illness/injury/crisis), you’re suffering enough. There’s no need to make yourself feel worse by berating yourself for breaking […]
Thriving in Discomfort: Guest Post by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
Writers, like any intelligent human being, do our best to avoid unnecessary discomfort. However, creativity requires a certain level of discomfort. Okay, full disclosure: what I really mean by “certain level of discomfort” is “a variable amount, that more often than not, is high, always higher than we wish, and usually equivalent to the joy […]
Why Publishing My Novel Is Not a New Year’s Resolution
Publishing my novel REALLY matters to me. So the last thing I want to do is make that a New Year’s Resolution. Roughly 80% of New Year’s Resolutions fail within a couple of months. Note the word order in that sentence – it’s resolutions that fail, not people. Here’s why. New Year’s Resolutions are typically […]
What’s the Point of Writing?
What’s your point? What’s your purpose as a writer? Why do you write? You don’t have to be able to rattle off your “artist’s statement” for someone else. You don’t even need to be able to clearly articulate it for yourself. But you do need a sense of why you write that will sustain you […]
Prepare for a Writer’s New Year
The New Year promises a fresh start, but only if we truly bring the current year to a close. If you don’t resolve the physical and emotional “incompletes” in your life, January 1 will look remarkably like December 31, with the possible minor difference of needing to clean up after the party. One of the […]
Halfway through the Dark
Take heart – we’re halfway through the dark. No matter how bleak it seems, we’re halfway through the dark. We are a nation divided, yet we are still a nation. We have been shaken to our Constitutional core, but we still have a Constitution. I won’t assume that you and I see the same causes […]
Writers: If People Insist on Giving You Books… Get the Good Ones!
While there is a bit of debate about Albus Dumbledore’s claimed regret that “People will insist on giving me books” instead of socks, the truth is, books are not a bad gift. Especially not for writers. In fact, many of us have trained family and friends to give us books. (If you’ve trained complete strangers […]
