Yes, your partner is a free-and-easy source of feedback for your WIP. But are you really ready for the truth?
Radical ideas for living and writing creatively.
Radical ideas for living and writing creatively.
Yes, your partner is a free-and-easy source of feedback for your WIP. But are you really ready for the truth?
What should writers do with all of our half-remembered ideas? To what lengths should we go to decipher and recapture them? Let’s ask Jerry Seinfeld.
What would it take to write One True Sentence? To really just write the stuffing out of something, to have it be unimpeachable and nearly universal? A lifetime of toil, it seems. All just for that one.
Whether we work fast or slow, most writers nurture a strange relationship with passing time. But how slow is too darned slow?
Can order and routine unlock the wildest outer reaches of a writer’s imagination? No better time than a Quarantine to find out.
You can pound out thousands of words an hour, but if they aren’t the right words, if they don’t strike anyone else as intelligible or interesting, then you haven’t really accomplished much.
How can we distinguish between things that are uncomfortable because they are helping us to grow and things that are uncomfortable because they are not the things we ought to be doing?
Writers often tell me they’ve read somewhere or other that the Prologue is Dead. Or the Epilogue is Dead. Démodée. Done-with.
Is it true?
Work breaks are a fundamental human right! To fully enjoy them, though, we must become more intentional about how we take them.
The short answer: No! The longer answer: Hell, No! Except in rare cases, when maybe you actually should.
What thing are you trying most earnestly to avoid thinking about? What is the story you hope never to have to write?
Will you permit me the luxury of yet one more writing-is-like-a-ship metaphor? I promise it’ll be good. Or at least short.
I hired a creative career coach to take me through a visioning process. It was … more than I bargained for.
By the time you encounter somebody’s song, or their painting, or their story, it’s been very nearly perfected. You are seeing the solution they devised after many, many hours of work.
In my sixteenth year, I took a job making taffy. The education it proffered was swift and brutal.
We talk endlessly about our creative processes. But undergirding all of these conversations is one (perhaps flawed) assumption: that process genuinely matters.
