How Writing a Book Is Like Moving to a New Place

How Writing a Book Is Like Moving to a New Place

At the beginning of 2022, my wife and I were presented with a special opportunity: She was offered a position working to streamline investment in eco-tourism in Sri Lanka. It would mean moving to the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo for ten months and taking my writing...
Detachment Gain: The Value of Getting Out of Your Own Head

Detachment Gain: The Value of Getting Out of Your Own Head

Don’t think harder—think better. Last fall a client I was working with shared a New York Times op-ed with me: “How to Think Outside of Your Brain.” As a ghostwriter and writing coach, I’m always on the lookout for tools that can lead to better writing—because in my...

. . .  novelists . . . have, on average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdales’s department store. our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anyone can do it. All it takes is time.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 128

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I once stayed in a hotel, next door to a well-known writer.
He never talked about writing.
Each night I heard his typewriter,
hour after hour,
past midnight.
Everyone else in the hotel was asleep.
The sound of that machine reminds me, still,
that what writers do is write.

—Richard Bach

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Flip Your Writing Switch

Flip Your Writing Switch

There is writing, and there is not writing. —David Morley I wanted to share this podcast from the Warwick “Writing Challenges,” because I believe it helps clarify the exact challenge that derails most writers the most often: our inability to sit down and get into the...