Power Writing

Reading time: About 3 minutes Using AI for writing costs more than you think. Research shows five things you lose when a chatbot does the thinking for you. London cab drivers have bigger brains than you do. Well, part of their brains, anyway. In 2000, a neuroscientist named Eleanor Maguire

Reading time: About 3 minutes How pets can help you write: a cat that enforces a morning routine, plus the science on why kittens make you a sharper editor. The best accountability partner I’ve heard about this year can’t read, doesn’t own a calendar and sleeps 16 hours a day.

Reading time: About 3 minutes Think like a writer with four detective habits that turn foggy drafts into clear copy. No muse or elbow-patch cardigan required. When I was in high school, teachers told me writers were born, not made. I pictured them in cardigans with leather elbow patches, blessed

Reading time: About 3 minutes Writing flow isn’t luck. Try five ways to invite it, from shrinking the job to stopping while you still know what comes next. Back in my newspaper days, I sometimes wrote my best stories with a deadline of 40 minutes and an editor hovering behind

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.