Don’t Waste Your Shower

Things that feel like a waste of time, like taking a shower or exercising or folding the laundry, can be put to good use as times of creative incubation. Try This Don’t waste your shower by taking it first thing in the morning. Instead, get to work on your creative project right away. Your decision-tank …

We Welcome All Writing

At Write to the End, we do two main activities: We write, and we welcome all writing. These two activities are the foundation of our group. Welcome. I welcome you, and I welcome your writing. All of your writing, not just the parts you think are worth welcoming. I use Natalie Goldberg’s method of writing …

Don’t Show Your Work to Your Friends

What’s the right thing to say to someone who has just shown you a manuscript of the worst prose you’ve ever seen, which they say is a story, but you can hardly even find a character let alone discern a plot? Wait, I’ll make it worse: They’re looking at you expectantly, as innocent as a …

Protect Your Reader’s Trust with Good Mechanics

Everyone is always telling you that you need good mechanics, so why am I wasting your time talking about it too? Well, if you already study regularly and frequently in your never-ending and joyful quest to master grammar, punctuation, and word usage, then please skip this article. But if your motivation or practice falls below …

Colorless Green Ideas Crashed My Car
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Your Right to Say Things that Don’t Make Sense

Syntax gives us the power to say things that don’t make sense: Ideas can’t have color (or crash a car), and something colorless can’t also be green, but I can say “colorless green ideas crashed my car,” and you can understand me, even if you’re quite not sure what I mean. The structure of a …

“I want these but don’t know how.”

What do you do with the pieces you don’t yet have the skill to finish? I used to leave them around in notebooks and never finish them. Half-abandoned, half-forgotten, they were a source of nebulous anxiety, though I vaguely planned to get back to them someday. Sometimes I’d remember one and think, “Hey, I know what …

Get Great Titles from Shakespeare, Yeats, and Paul Simon

Here’s a fun way to get titles. You can use this method to title a piece you’ve already written, or you can use the titles as prompts and re-title later if you write something that doesn’t fit. Titles from Poems: The Method Find the text of a song or poem you like. Prose doesn’t usually …

The Serving Dinner Model of Publishing

Do you have a pile of unfinished pieces? Would you like to find a way to finish more projects? Here’s a method I’m using that helps me. (Note: It’s normal for creative people to start many more projects than they finish, so please never feel bad about that pile again. But you can improve your …

The Parable of the Salad Bandage,
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The Thesaurus Is Susceptible to User Error,
or
You Actually Need to Find Out What Words Mean

When I studied Spanish in high school, we had an assignment to write a recipe and present it in class. One of the recipes was for Homemade Ranch Salad Bandage – you know, that white stuff you put on a salad when it skins its knee. Yes, they actually meant salad dressing. But guess what. The …

Do It More

When somebody tells you to take something out, sometimes the solution is to do it more. This often works in visual art: That area of purple in the upper right corner of your painting, the one that’s “ruining” the composition? Instead of removing it, put more purple in other parts of the painting. Suddenly it all comes together. I …