Power Writing

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

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