When Writing Is Like Good Sex…

When your inner critic nags you to get busy writing too early it ruins the experience. It’s premature — like thinking of sexual foreplay as procrastination.
Jumping in the sack with your text editor too soon ignores your need for rumination and inspiration. Just as the anticipation of foreplay enriches sex, ruminating, playing and [...]

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How Make-believe And Play Enhance Writing

Make-believe is “Imaginative intellectual play” (WordNet database — Princeton University). Invite your dragon to play, to help rediscover your childhood imagination, and watch your writing come alive.

Take a peek into Emily’s imaginative world. She was a real princess that day. Emily and her friends weren’t simply pretending, they were princesses. Logical? Not for these six [...]

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When Pro Writers are Blocked, What Do They Do?

They sit down to write, but they might open a can of cat food first. Complaining about writer’s block is like looking at the cat food dish and complaining that it’s empty. Of course it’s empty — you have to fill it. When you have deadlines and commitments, not writing isn’t an option. You don’t [...]

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Musings: On The Tao of Writing

Writing is difficult? Writing is easy? Yes it is.
“Easy gives rise to difficult … resonance harmonizes sound, after follows before.” — Lau Tzu
When the vessel is empty, fill it to overflowing. When the vessel is overflowing, distill the essence. — McD
Western thought is either/or, an artificial duality that, when focused on one aspect of some [...]

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Inspiration: Girl’s Night Out at the Diner

The twins were 9 months old the other day. We all went to the diner for dinner on Monday night so naturally I brought my camera. My daughter calls me pop-poparazzi. I love B&W available light photography and who could resist subjects like these. My granddaughters have always been my favorite subjects and now we [...]

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Word Processing: The Enemy of Writing

I don’t know what I’m thinking until I write. I can’t remember who said that or if my remembering is even accurate. Writing has nothing to do with word processing, the eternal quest for the perfect editor or the latest megaflop — do everything faster — super computer. Technology is the enemy of writing, a [...]

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Poke Yourself When Your Dragon’s Draggin’

Trying to get the words out by brute force is like pounding on a bottle of cold ketchup. It never works. Warm up with some fun and the words will pour out faster than you can type. Follow Julia’s example and be silly. Bet you can’t look at this picture without smiling. Go ahead, poke [...]

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The Zen of Pure Innocence

How can a writer possibly describe a moment like this? Julia seems so innocent, so calm, so at peace with herself and her world. Words would break the spell. I simply can’t find the words. And I can’t help but think that any words I choose to describe this moment would fall into an empty [...]

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Distill Your Thoughts Before You Write

When those first few words simply refuse to come. When you sit in front of the blank screen puzzled. Give your inner critic the task of describing what you want to write about (he or she is probably good at that), then turn the job of distilling the essence of your article over to your [...]

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Writing: How Clustering Silences Your Inner Critic

Clustering opens the floodgates of creativity. It quiets your inner critic and invites your creative self (I think of him as my dragon) to come out and play. Clustering is easy, it’s quick and it works. I learned (am still learning) the technique from “Writing the Natural Way” by Gabriele Rico, PhD.
Here’s an example that [...]

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