Power Writing

Reading time: About 3 minutes Write more consistently by fixing your system, not your willpower. Here are six habits, some backwards, that keep writers showing up. One of my clients wrote every day for 43 days in a row, and then she stopped for five months. When she finally came

Reading time: About 3 minutes Daily writing habit: why your writing should be like a river, moving a little every day, not a yearly binge followed by guilt. Is your book or dissertation feeling too big to finish? Join my fr/ee class this Thursday, Oct. 8, at 1 pm Pacific

Reading time: About 3 minutes Intrusive thoughts when writing can stop you cold. Try these six defusion techniques, from silly voices to thanking your mind. I have a thought that shows up at roughly the 400-word mark of every first draft I write. It says: your readers will find this

Reading time: About 3 minutes What to do when you can’t write: some days the words won’t come. Four research-backed strategies to get them moving again. Some days the words won’t come. You sit down at the desk you tidied for the occasion. You open the file. The last paragraph

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.