Scrivener is an application designed for pretty much any kind of writer. This program is incredible, and it’s been around for a while. I’m late to the game. I can’t believe I didn’t try it before — especially when there’s a 30-day free trial available. When I’m working on a novel I’m always juggling a
I recently finished Jonah Lehrer’s new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. It feels a little Gladwellish, but if you don’t mind that, it’s a fascinating examination of how our brains work, how we function when we’re being creative and artistic. I found it to be incredibly inspiring and reassuring. One of my favorite parts of
Jonathan Safran Foer emailed my workshop group today with a Hasidic parable. It’s about prayer, but he wanted us to think about it in terms of writing. I loved it so much I thought I’d share it here: There was once a musician, well-known for the great beauty of his music, who came to play
Jonathan Safran Foer challenged our workshop group to do an experiment. ”I do it every other day,” he said. ”I wake up at four in the morning, I turn off my internet, and I just write for as long as I can.” He asked all of us to give it a try for just one
Remember when I blogged about morning pages? Well I recently found this awesome site called 750 Words which exists just for the purpose of motivating you to do your morning pages. 750 Words is basically the digital version of the morning pages ritual, for people who feel more comfortable and think more clearly when they
A friend of mine just recently showed me this fantastic site: www.writtenkitten.net Kittens! Who doesn’t love cute kittens? The idea is that you are rewarded with a picture of an adorable kitten for every X number of words you write. You can decide whether to you want a fresh kitten after ever 100 words, 200
Here is why I now recommend NaNoWriMo to all writers of all levels: It forces you to move forward. When you hit any kind of block, you don’t have the time to sit and agonize over it. You have to just push through or skip ahead. I discovered that often when I just left gaps
NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It happens every November, when people from all over the world scramble to reach a word count of 50,000 words — the marker that indicates you’ve “won” the challenge. I’ve watched it happen every year since 2002 or so, and I’ve always scorned it as an exercise I
