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After a while, you get sick and tired of writing. You just want to quit. Is it that notorious condition known as writer’s block? It could be, but in many cases it’s a little bit different. There are a few things going on:You’re bored with what you’re writing about. Boredom kills affection.You’ve exhausted your creative energy. Creativity, like a muscle, has its limits. Push it too hard, and it caves in.You need something more challenging. Lack of challenge -- goals, vision, perspective -- leads to disillusionment. You need some fresh experiences. Fresh experiences will give you a fresh perspective.It’s time to figure out how to get your brain back on task. How do you get past the drudgery and enjoy writing again? Let's talk through a few tips....
If you want to make something that people really care about, that they actually give a hot shit about, you have to care about it yourself. Because if you don’t, then try as you might, it’ll come out in the final product.
The reason for this?
Making something is hard. Making something you don’t care about is even harder.
The only way you’ll be able to consistently work, when you don’t want to work, consistently try when you don’t want to try, is by deeply and honestly caring about your work....
While the majority of our readers are likely beyond college age, it’s still fun to wistfully remember your experimental undergraduate years—or whatever they were. That’s why I’ve written a list of the 10 best colleges for creative writers, based on my own highly idiosyncratic metrics: accomplished professors, famous alumni, environments conducive to writing, bizarre course selections, and, best of all, any random facts that might add to the writerly collegiate experience.
As soon as you start to try to write, everything freezes up.
How can you fix this?
Don’t write.
Instead, answer questions.
Think about it like this:
If my wife asks me “Bryan, why do you think most people never act on their ideas?”
I would answer in less than 5 seconds with at least 3 minutes worth of dialogue....
When the masses only connect to the net without a keyboard, who will be left to change the world?
It is possible but unlikely that someone will write a great novel on a tablet.
You can't create the spreadsheet that changes an industry on a smart phone.
And professional programmers don't sit down to do their programming with a swipe....
The key thing to realise, Pinker argues, is that writing is "cognitively unnatural." For almost all human existence, nobody wrote anything; even after that, for millennia, only a tiny elite did so. And it remains an odd way to communicate. You can't see your readers' facial expressions. They can't ask for clarification. Often, you don't know who they are, or how much they know. How to make up for all this?
Pinker's answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach "joint attention". Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else's attention to something visible.
Now that TV is the place for serious people with long attention spans, we’re really in trouble
...Allow me to paraphrase. Back in the day, the powers that be had an imperfect but workable recipe for turning our brains in to nice steaming bowls of beef stew using television. But some people saw through that plan. Today, TV is really just as dumb as ever, but it is out-dumbed by the internet. When these two forces work together… Ding! Stew’s ready....
Newbies and pros do it. They want to be writers, they like to think of themselves as writers, they feel like they should be writing, and yet they’re uninspired to do so…by anything. It’s not a valid excuse. You’re just being lazy and ignorant.
The world and everyone in it are bombarding you around the clock with things to write. The problem is your senses aren’t on. Instead of asking what you can write about, you should be asking, “Why aren’t I aware and making something of everything that’s being given to me?” Here are 11 things for you to mull over while you’re busy being stuck....
If you really want to write, you can and will make time for it. And I'm going to tell you how to write a book.Today, I’m going to let you in on a little secret:Anyone can write a book.Yes, that’s right, I said anyone. Even you. You have stories you want to tell. You have things you want to say. You are the only person on Earth who can tell others how you see the world, and you feel about a given subject, a particular theme or trope. Whether you’re a natural writer or in need some polish, you can write a book....
Ever get writer's block? Here's a free tool that'll help you kick it to the curb.
The tool won't just come up with ideas willy-nilly. Blog topics will make or break the success of your blog posts -- so your topics will be both search-friendly and interesting to your audience. Using keywords you provide, the tool will come up engaging titles tailored to those terms. That way, you're always featuring relevant, but interesting posts on your blog
.If you're one of those types who likes to dive in and play around with it immediately, go on: try it out for yourself. If you're the type who likes to be walked through using tools step by step, that's cool too. Just keep reading....
In observance of National Word Nerd Day, we offer an array of symptoms that indicate your affinity for correct grammar, usage, syntax, punctuation, and spelling run deeper than that of others.
These funny, crass, and addictive sites are must-reads for any 20-something who cares about books.
The new literary generation is here, and it's bored — bored with the New Yorker, bored with the New York Times, bored with the New York Review of Books.We need new literary sustenance. We want writing by people who understand the tremendous attentional effort it requires to read more than three sentences of anything. We want a literary La La Land that gives us gifs and James Joyce in the same breath. Screw it — we want gifs of James Joyce.
While I look for those, take a look at these: The best — funniest, crassest, headiest, least boring, most addictive — literary blogs for 20-something readers and writers....
Three unpublished stories by the famously reclusive American writer, J.D. Salinger, have leaked online after appearing on an eBay auction.The auction, which ended Sep. 23, 2013, advertised a book containing three stories, titled "Untitled or Paula," "Birthday Boy," and "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls". The first two stories are dated 1941 and 1946, respectively, while the third one doesn't have a date....
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Any description I write for this collection will pale in comparison to the excellent copywriting examples contained herein.
Metaphor is not the sole preserve of Shakespearean scholarship or high literary endeavour but has governed how we think about and describe our daily lives for centuries, according to researchers at Glasgow University.
Experts have now created the world’s first online Metaphor Map, which contains more than 14,000 metaphorical connections sourced from 4m pieces of lexical data, some of which date back to 700AD.
While it is impossible to pinpoint the oldest use of metaphor in English, because some may have been adopted from earlier languages such as Germanic, the map reveals that the still popular link between sheep and timidity dates back to Old English. Likewise, we do not always recognise modern use of metaphor: for example, the word “comprehend” comes from Latin, where it meant to physically grasp an object.
The three-year-long project to map the use of metaphor across the entire history of the English language, undertaken by researchers at the School of Critical Studies, was based on data contained in the Historical Thesaurus of English, which spans 13 centuries....
To a writer, there's nothing scarier, yet full of pristine possibility, than a blank Word document. After YouTube's most prominent mixologist Mamrie Hart got a book deal last year, she suddenly found herself with hundreds of those blank slates lined up in a row, like so many cars to be jumped by Evel Kneivel's motorcycle. Somehow, she managed to clear them all—but not without some serious challenges along the way.
At the outset of each new year, humanity sets out to better itself as we resolve to eradicate our unhealthy habits and cultivate healthy ones. But while the most typical New Year's resolutions tend to be about bodily health, the most meaningful ones aim at a deeper kind of health through the refinement of our mental, spiritual, and emotional habits – which often dictate our physical ones.
In a testament to young Susan Sontag's belief that rereading is an act of rebirth, I have revisited the timelessly rewarding ideas of great thinkers from the past two millennia to cull fifteen such higher-order resolutions for personal refinement....
OK so I know that there's YouTube and podcasting but most of the Internet's power is still in the written word. It is text that conveys most of the important ideas and it is accessible at almost zero cost to all of us.
...We need to start small, to take baby steps. Even the practise of keeping a paper journal is immensely powerful. We often don't know what we think until we write it down. Jotting down ideas and impressions gets us in the habit of thinking about what we think and better at expressing it. As we get more confident we can share some of our insights online. Whether by blogging or updating Facebook we can put things out there, see what reactions we get, learn from the responses. Rinse and repeat....
...Take a simple word, like “flash.” In all the dictionaries I’ve ever known, I would have never looked up that word. I’d've had no reason to — I already knew what it meant. But go look up “flash” in Webster’s (the edition I’m using is the 1913). The first thing you’ll notice is that the example sentences don’t sound like they came out of a DMV training manual (“the lights started flashing”) — they come from Milton and Shakespeare and Tennyson (“A thought flashed through me, which I clothed in act”).
You’ll find a sense of the word that is somehow more evocative than any you’ve seen. “2. To convey as by a flash… as, to flash a message along the wires; to flash conviction on the mind.” In the juxtaposition of those two examples — a message transmitted by wires; a feeling that comes suddenly to mind — is a beautiful analogy, worth dwelling on, and savoring. Listen to that phrase: “to flash conviction on the mind.” This is in a dictionary, for God’s sake....
Be quotable. Make your point. It’s kind of like a tag line. Sum it up in eight words or less.
Sound bites have typically been associated with political speeches and the subsequent ‘confusion’ (allegedly) created by reporters who have irresponsibly taken things out of context
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A sound bite or quote is the short tight combination of words that hits your message home....
Today, we depend on sound bites because of the dwindling attention span of our society. Too often, 140 characters are too many.
Below are five ways to recognize valuable snippets and sound bites so your communication pops:...
Do Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace qualify, and if not, why not?...
Perhaps the most eloquent consideration of this question is Italo Calvino’s essay, “Why Read the Classics?,” in which he defines a classic as “a book that has never finished saying what it has to say,” among a list of other qualities. But as wondrous as that sounds, it could also describe some books we read today — “Infinite Jest,” for example — books that most of our contemporaries would deem too recent for classic status. I also love Calvino’s effort to capture the imaginative quality of a great literary work — “a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans” — but suspect that the following is more accurate: “The classics are the books that come down to us bearing upon them the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through.”...
Most writers simply begin writing the moment they come up with an ebook idea they feel is worth pursuing. However, it’s best to wait a moment…or a few moments…to focus and evaluate that idea. This helps your book have a chance of succeeding in the ever-more competitive ebook market. To give your book a good start, take the following six steps before you write an ebook...
...After years of using my portable digital library, the honeymoon period had started to wear off. My life with the digital library was getting complicated. From books not downloading on certain devices, to formatting issues, to some eBooks having illegible low resolution diagrams; I had a longing for the times of old. I didn’t want to troubleshoot my reading experience, I wanted the world to disappear and the story I was reading to take over. I had purchased an electronic version of Eric Reis’ book ‘The Lean Startup’ a year or so ago and I recently wanted to re-read it. This time around I opted for a physical paper book and left my iPad at home.
The reading experience was unlike anything I had become accustomed to reading digitally. It was simple, just one book; a start, a middle and an end. The print and imagery were clear and for the first time in years I had focus...
The pace of social media is relentless. It tempts you hourly to enter the Twitter Twilight Zone. The Facebook Folie Bergere beckons. Pinterest pulls you into its vortex while everywhere by the grace of Google go all of us.
And blogging? Don’t get me started. My microblogging and blog posting owned me.
That’s why I decided to take a blog “holiday” this past November and December.
Ponder good luck and ill fortune for 2014 with authors Matt Bell, Julianna Baggott, Jacinda Townsend and more...The New Year is a time to think about luck, magic and omens, so Salon asked a few authors for two-sentence stories (originally inspired by these, on Reddit), about a blessing, a curse or both. Read what they came up with, and be careful what you wish for...
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Suffering from writer's block? Feeling uninspired? Check out Neil Patel's five tips for moving past the drudgery to enjoy writing again.