What I’ve learned from navigating these difficult times is not to be afraid to take a pause. Whether you’re experiencing hardship, burnout, a decrease in clarity, vision, or motivation, a welcome pause can bring renewal, softening, and spaciousness back to your life.
I want to share some suggestions for how to sustain your writing practice when your regular group/ people/supports are not available.
Developing strong listening skills is critical for anyone’s growth as a writer.
I am a huge advocate of using timed writing from prompts, which helped me create the manuscript for my memoir, The Chocolate Pilgrim. To this day, prompts are a big part of my process
Without diminishing the suffering and the challenges that may be happening right now in your life and the lives of loved ones, there are still opportunities to notice a small kindness, the sight of a red rose, a purple iris, or feel uplifted by the light in someone’s eyes.
Your writing style and your writing voice are made up of who you are and everything you have experienced in your lifetime…
The bar to calling oneself a writer in our culture is high. It seems that you have to make money writing in order to call yourself a writer…
I suspect that I’m not the only writer out there who has sometimes felt overwhelmed by the size of the story I envision. How do I begin?
Keep your pen moving; don’t stop and wait for the perfect words to arrive. If you run out of things to say, keep repeating the same word until something new arises.
If you find yourself trying to correct your writing as you work on a first draft, chances are you’ll stall out in mid-sentence while waiting for the perfect word to show up on the page. How do you know your first draft is ready for revision?
