I’m a trial by fire guy. I haven’t always been that way, but I’ve learned to love it, especially with writing. As an entrepreneur, I subscribe to the READY, FIRE, AIM methodology, as opposed to the traditional READY, AIM, FIRE.
I know authors who subscribe to the READY, READY, AIM, AIM, AIM system. ‘Work In’ never translates to ‘Work Out’. Are you one of them?
Being a good writer also being means a good character in your life story. Four life-tips that will make you a better writer: live, steal, run, and think.
Have you ever attended a writer conference? If not, what the hell are you waiting for?
If you have, did you get the most you possibly could out of it? If you did, great. I want to hear all about it in the comments. If not, you need to read this post.
In our online conversation two weeks ago, I exhorted The Write Practice community to answer three fundamental questions about their writer’s soul, and asked you to tell me what you need help with the most.
The one thing that most of you called out for, overwhelmingly, was time. Well, you’re in luck because that is my all-time (pun intended) favorite fascination. So much so that I wrote a book and am running a seminar series on it.
The burning question is, how do we find more time in our ridiculous schedules to write? How can we expand, stretch, push the limits of the time we do have? How do we bleed out those extra seconds, minutes, and hours we’re having to spend sitting in traffic/doodling in desperation in mind-numbing company meetings/frozen in line at the grocery store/stuck in the unavoidable time warp of the post office?
It’s funny what we can learn about writing from other, unrelated activities. For example, I’ve found that canoeing, shopping and learning to play the piano have all informed my writing practice. But little else in my life has taught me as much about writing as giving birth to triplets, twenty years ago.
In an effort to win the heart of Zelda Sayre, F. Scott Fitzgerald finished his first novel, This Side of Paradise, at age twenty-three. Truman Capote caught the attention of Random House publishing with his story Miriam, just shy of his twenty-first birthday. When Ernest Hemingway was twenty-six he wrote The Sun Also Rises, and Mary Shelley completed the manuscript for Frankenstein at nineteen. Perhaps it’s just my own insecurities leaving me feeling rather inadequate with this knowledge, but I suspect I’m not alone.
