When you’re exhausted, you make decisions based in fear. This is inevitably the wrong path. Decisions based in fear will always leave you with giant messes that may take weeks, months, even years to fix. I speak from experience here: during the first phase of my business, I kept pushing, pushing pushing when I was [...]
ShareSo you finally get a nice big chunk of writing time to really dream and create, and who shows up, but the psychic vampire. Not Vampire Bill from True Blood, awesomely ESP-ing you that he’s coming to save your Sookie-ass from big nasty monsters. No, today, sadly, I am not talking about that kind of [...]
ShareIt is currently scandalous to say so, but: women’s and men’s brains are different, and women’s brains don’t naturally focus. It Is All About the Babies Our brains operate with something called “diffuse awareness,” according to my favorite relationship expert Alison Armstrong, which means we are constantly aware of many things at once. (DNA wise, [...]
ShareMistake #2: Trying to Escape Self-Doubt Before You Sit Down to Write THE SCOOP: In a Conversation with Fear, Fear Usually Wins Most of us have that icky dread feeling, to some degree, on many of the days we sit down to write. For me, it’s most days, especially if I have had to skip [...]
ShareThis week, I have the first article in a series (woohoo! a series!). (And these culprits are soooo not what you think they are!) Mistake #1: Messy house or office THE SCOOP: Ms. Perfect Kills the Writing Vibe I used to feel really guilty that I had to make everything PERFECT on my desk and [...]
ShareA lot of the tools I give to my students to make their writing easier and better are things I have integrated into my own writing and life so much I don’t really have to think about it. Yet: I still have totally crazy horrible resistance-to-the-writing days. Monster days. It reminds me of how a [...]
ShareI’m so grateful for all the inspiring replies to last week’s launch of the newsletter and site! Thank you. I’ve been hearing from some of my beloved old-school Elizabeth’s Workshops writing students and it’s so inspiring–years on, people now have finished writing these full-grown, amazing books that I was privileged to help out with when [...]
ShareThis was originally going to be ten tips. But I realized: the uber-tip, the baseline of how to amp up your productivity and your sanity, is to cut unrealistic expectations of yourself in HALF. I will be modeling this for you now: you don’t actually need ten tips. You only need five. Because if you [...]
ShareSo I call my people—my students, my clients—the “Hearts with Brains.” I will explain. But first let me tell you how I finally found them: I started my writing workshops in Brooklyn back in 2003, on a whim, after I moved into a more-expensive apartment and needed to figure out how to cover the rent. [...]
ShareEverybody wants to write a book. Writers who have published a book on any subject will tell you that they get more emails about how to get published than they do about the actual content of their work. Most published writers have at least one uncle/neighbor/ex-boyfriend who is currently querying agents. There is this big, [...]
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