Book Coaching & Editing Services for Writers of Fiction & Creative Nonfiction
Please enjoy this guest post by writer and runner Collin Mitchell. Much has been written about the relationship between running and the successful writing life: there are the obvious comparisons between the slog of marathon training and producing a novel, the way fresh air and exertion clears fog from the brain, and the age-old idea … Read More
Feature image courtesy of Mackenzie Kram. Sylvia Plath kept bees. Madeleine L’Engle played the piano. Flannery O’Connor raised peacocks. Emily Dickinson was an award-winning baker. Franz Kafka collected porn. I can’t remember what triggered it. I think it may have been a book I was reading, The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. Whatever it was, … Read More
Feature image of writer & aerialist Chih Wang courtesy of Brandi Cooper. I got such a great response to my request for the ways my writer friends’ pastimes inform their writing that I thought I’d share a half dozen more this week … and a half dozen more next week! Here’s part two of writers … Read More
Feature image “Morning Star” courtesy of Trey Burnette. I’ve been fascinated lately with the way our creative interests and hobbies play into or support our writing. Nearly all of my writer friends have other interests. Some are creative, some are just for fun, some are more grounding. I asked a half dozen writers to tell … Read More
I’ve been reading about writing, editing, and creativity lately, and a theme that keeps popping up is the amount of time and hard work it takes to acquire natural born writing talent. We’ve all read stories of “overnight success”–talented actors, writers, musicians, who seemingly burst onto the scene out of nowhere. What we don’t hear … Read More
I want to talk to you today about a Flavorwire article I read eight years ago. It’s an old article, yes, but (1) it’s still relevant today, and (2) it made such an impact on me that I’m still thinking about it eight years later. I also want to point out that, while the 2014 article … Read More
Over the past month, I’ve been setting out the steps for turning your writing dreams into attainable goals: 1. Set your dreams down in writing (The Power of Words); 2. Create specific goals (The Power of Goals); 3. Create a plan to reach your goals (The Power of a Plan); 4. Focus on one goal … Read More
I’m a big fan of dreaming without limits. But something I’ve learned the hard way is that, if you ever want to reach your dream life, it’s important to focus your efforts. Focus, visualization, and determination are powerful tools that will help you to reach even the most seemingly impossible goals. Rather than spreading yourself … Read More
Last week, I wrote about setting goals for your writing and mentioned a famous quote from Yogi Berra: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” A man, a plan, a canal—Panama. This is much more than my daughter’s favorite palindrome. It’s a blueprint for success. When Theodore Roosevelt dreamed of … Read More
This is a case history. I’m sharing my long, arduous, and disjointed writing journey with you in the hopes you can skip to the good part. I started writing short stories in elementary school. In my teens, I shifted to writing very bad, very schmaltzy, very angsty poetry. In my twenties: As an undergraduate at … Read More