Power Writing

Reading time: About 4 minutes Writing motivation always fades on a long writing project. Here are seven ways to keep going, starting with why you should never reread from page one. There’s a moment in every long writing project when you realize you no longer care about it. You once

Reading time: About 3 minutes Writer burnout doesn’t respond to rest. Learn what really causes it and the research-backed habits that help you recover for good… I burned out once. In those days, I ran a struggling weekly newspaper, owned by my father, and it was a stress +++ job.

Reading time: About 3 minutes Wondering why reading matters? Guilt and discipline won’t get you reading. Pleasure will. Six ways to make books fun again… My son is severely dyslexic, and he struggled mightily with reading as a child. We could see he was incredibly intelligent, and we used every

Reading time: 3 minutes The boredom advice everyone repeats is wrong. Boredom doesn’t generate ideas — it processes them. Here’s how to make it work for you. I’ll never forget the time my electricity went out for two hours on a Thursday afternoon. It was awful. I couldn’t even make

Reading time: About 3 minutes Are you a night owl? Someone has probably made you feel bad for that. But I won’t do that to you! Some people bounce out of bed at 5 a.m., wide awake and cruelly cheerful, and knock out 550 words before their coffee has finished

Reading time: About 3 minutes Do you suffer from time anxiety? Join the club! Most people in the developed world struggle with it, but it needn’t undo your writing. Read on to learn why… I own four clocks and timers in an office that measures roughly 10 feet by 12.

Reading time: About 2 minutes I plan to spend most of my birthday reading, but if you’d like to help my blog, there’s one small thing you could do… This Saturday is my birthday. I’m not going to tell you the number — let’s just say I’ve earned every one

Reading time: About 3 minutes By temperament, I’m an “awfulizer” — someone who always imagines the worst possible outcome. If negative thoughts plague your writing, read on for some helpful advice… A few years ago, a client told me she’d written one sentence so clumsy she wanted to delete the

Reading time: About 3 minutes If you ever struggle with feeling scatterbrained (and who doesn’t?), here are some practical and easy tips for you. You sit down to write. You have the time, the coffee, the open document. But your brain just won’t cooperate. You read the same sentence four

Reading time: About 3 minutes There are lots of excuses but no good reasons. You need to learn how to write when you’re being interrupted… A reader wrote to me last week in despair. She works from home, has two kids and a dog and shares an office with her