Reading time: About 3 minutes Does writing ramp up your stress and cause you to blow the occasional gasket? Here’s how to become a calmer person… I’m usually a calm person, but I’ll never forget the time a crisis threatened to obliterate my composure. It occurred when I had a busy, C-suite job at a […]
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post about why we stop writing…. Do you tell yourself lies about your writing? In a recent post, the
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Viewing time: 4 mins 19 secs The Write Question is a weekly video podcast about writing that I started in 2017 and that ran, more or less weekly, until April 2022. This is a republication of issue #194, which addresses how to stop recording videos. The post first ran on July 9/21. Transcript: How
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Reading time: Just over 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes and metaphors from Mark Haddon…. When I read the remarkable 2003 book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — about a teenager on the
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Reading time: About 2 minutes Rue Matthiessen says that taking an 18-month break from her most recent book helped her to see its flaws and understand how to fix them… Rue Matthiessen is a writer based on the East End of Long Island. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice, her essays and short fiction have
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Reading time: About 3 minutes Are you rethinking your career as a writer in the age of AI? Read this post before you do that! Some people see AI as so disruptive they believe it’s going to eliminate the need for writers entirely. Cue apocalyptic music. While I have lots of concerns about AI (to
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post about where to look for a literary agent…. Readers ask me all the time for good tricks to
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Viewing time: 5 mins The Write Question is a weekly video podcast about writing that I started in 2017 and that ran, more or less weekly, until April 2022. This is a republication of issue #193, which addresses how to use transitions more skillfully. The post first ran on July 2/21. Transcript: How can
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes and metaphors from Kristen Arnett… When I heard that the main character in a first novel by Kristen Arnett (pictured above) was a taxidermist, my spidey senses
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Reading time: About 2 minutes Farah Ghafoor encourages new writers to follow their own interests and write about what is most captivating to them. Farah Ghafoor is an award-winning poet based in Toronto, Ontario. Her debut collection of poetry, recently released by House of Anansi Press. Shadow Price, explores the idea of value at the intersection of
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