From the monthly archives:

December 2009

Is Writer’s Block ‘Repeatedly Hitting Your Head’ or ‘Hitting Your Head Repeatedly’

I see a lot of books and tools out there that seek to address or overcome writer’s block. That’s good. It’s good to have a lot of options. Sometimes it’s good to have a distraction (like fussing around with a writer’s block tool instead of writing). I’m going to propose an alternative. Decide to relax. [...]

Ideas You Can Get While Showering

There are three places where I always get ideas. Good place #1: The Shower. Always. It’s like a portable brilliant box, a place you can go into and by the time you come out you’ve got a head full of fresh ideas and a clean body. Actually, I should invent some sort of device that [...]

What Sly Stone Can Get You To Learn About Writing – Part Three

“Different strokes for different folks.” Everyone’s heard this one. How does it apply to writing? Do what you love and be your own authority. No one can tell you what your style is. The best way to get better at anything is to get involved with your style of doing one thing. None of us [...]

Poetry, Oscillation, and John Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez

If there is one constant, it’s fluctuation, and that is a beautiful thing. In John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, one of my favorite books of all time, he speaks brilliantly about oscillation. Here is one example: How simple if a star floated by unchangeably. On clear nights such a star is [...]

What Sly Stone Can Get You To Learn About Writing – Part Two

“You can make it if you try, push a little harder, think a little deeper.” I recently heard Tony Robbins’ interview of John Reese in which John said that it’s the people who do just 5% more than their competitors that earn all the money. He was discussing making money, but this applies to the [...]

What Sly Stone Can Get You To Learn About Writing – Part One

“It’s not the teaching, it’s the learning.” For those of us who have been students and those who have been teachers, each of us understands the limitations of academia and the benefits of actual experience. Likewise, anyone who has any experience with academia understands the benefits of a good teacher and how they can strategically [...]

Have You Helped Tibet Lately?

Just a brief post detailing some important actions you can take today to help Tibet. There is a campaign called Tibet Third Pole which was created to raise awareness of Tibet’s environmental crisis to the media, general public, and climate change negotiators at the United Nations talks in Copenhagen. It is so good to have [...]

Why Experienced Writers Benefit From Tips and Prompts

The short answer: because it’s a dialogue with craft. Anytime you engage in dialogue with craft, you’re at least doing something. Activity always produces some sort of result, and activity coupled with an intention and some sensory acuity usually produces the desired result in time. So much of the challenge for many writers is often [...]

The 12th Best Book for Writers

When I hastily put together my addition to The 10 Best Books for Writers, I left off Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer Few books have taught me as much as Peter Turchi’s book has. This text reads like a life’s work. Maps of the Imagination is essentially an extended metaphor [...]

The 11 Best Books for Writers

After reading this post from Editors Unleashed I needed to get the word out. One key book was missing from the list. Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World is a phenomenal collection of craft essays that any serious writer cannot do without. I was lucky enough to take part in the section of a Form & [...]

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