Power Writing

Reading time: About 3 minutes Is your task urgent, important or something for a “to-don’t” list? Make sure you label all of these different items accordingly… [Before you read: I’m hosting a free class for subscribers on Tuesday, June 30/26 at 1 pm Pacific — Why Discipline Isn’t the Problem — with an extensive Q&A. […]

Reading time: About 3 minutes Do you feel you’re getting worse at writing? No! It’s an optical illusion brought on by your increasing skills…. Last spring, a client of mine had been writing for about eight months. Every day, or close to it, she logged brief sessions, nothing heroic. She was working on a memoir

Reading time: About 3 minutes Do you suffer from the illusion of explanatory depth? Also known as the confidence trap, this error confuses familiarity with understanding…. Ask someone how a zipper works. Not in a vague way. Ask them to explain it — the teeth, the slider, the mechanism that pulls two sides together into

Reading time: About 3 minutes Do you wince when you hear about the success of other writers? It’s likely you’re just suffering from availability bias… You’ve probably never heard of the availability bias. But it’s been running most of our writing lives for years. Here’s how it works: When we try to judge how common

Reading time: About 3 minutes Do you trash talk yourself, or do you know how to get your inner voice to talk better to you? If you write, you’ve heard it. That voice. The one that shows up around paragraph three to announce that the whole thing is terrible and you should probably give up

Reading time: About 3 minutes If strange words and counter-intuitive ideas appeal to you, read on to learn how jootsing can improve your writing… The word looks ridiculous on the page: Jootsing. And it sounds worse out loud. Try saying, “I jootsed today” with a straight face. Still, the idea behind it is incredibly useful.

Reading time: About 3 minutes Are you part of the select group of people actually achieving writing goals? Or did you give up on them back in February? Every January, writers everywhere make the same promises. Finish the novel. Submit to 12 literary magazines. Build a newsletter audience. Write every single day without fail. Now

Reading time: About 3 minutes It sounds counterintuitive, but working less as a writer will actually help make you more productive… Here’s a confession that’s going to sound lazy: By noon, I’m often done with the serious work of the day. Why: I do most of my best writing before 10 a.m. I’m not bragging.

Reading time: About 3 minutes Don’t white-knuckle your way through a first draft. Instead, learn to rehabilitate your attention. Did you know that school children are having a hard time watching movies in class? Why? Because the movies are too long. Raised on a diet of 10-second videos and their parents’ glazed-over phone faces, kids

Reading time: About 3 minutes Academic writing is challenging. Here are four mistakes that will stall your dissertation…. If you want more support and accountability for your writing, now is the time to think about joining my three-month writing program. The quarterly admission window closes at 11:59 p.m. Thursday, and the next opportunity to join