Power Writing

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… Want to finish your book, thesis or dissertation — or simply write significantly faster? Join my next Get It Done program: a three-month accountability group […]

Reading time: About 3 minutes Instead of throat-clearing in writing, just encourage yourself to get to the point more expeditiously…. Someone sent me an email last week. The first paragraph was warm and friendly and ran to six sentences. Not one of them said anything. The writer was trying to

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… Everyone talks about to-do lists. I want to talk about the other kind. I’ve worked with writers for more than 25 years, and one

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

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

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

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

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

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