A particular myth follows writers everywhere: that the work begins when the feeling arrives. The right mood, the right morning, the right swell of energy — and only then the page. It's a generous-sounding theory, but it leaves the writer waiting more than working, and most manuscripts that ...Read More
There is a cursor blinking on a white screen. There is a working title at the top of the document — something I typed in two days ago and have since stopped looking at because looking at it makes it real. There is an outline I drafted on ...Read More
Try something. Pick a writer whose work you admire — doesn't matter which one — and look up their daily routine. The internet is full of these. There are entire books made of them. The thing you will notice, after the third or fourth one, is that none ...Read More
For longer than I'd like to admit, I wrote like a worse version of Mark Manson. I'd read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck — like a lot of people in their twenties around that time — and something about the voice had imprinted on me. The ...Read More
A few months back, I came across a piece in Scientific American by Charlotte Hu that stopped me in my tracks. The line that did it was this: "Engaging the fine motor system to produce letters by hand has positive effects on learning and memory." I'm not a doctor or ...Read More
For most of the past decade, I treated notebooks as something to scribble in when my laptop battery died. Real work, I told myself, happened on a screen. Words per minute mattered. Cmd-Z mattered. The notebook was for shopping lists and the occasional reminder. Then around the start of ...Read More