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 …

Accept the Magic of Imagination

  Ringing the Bell When I was a kid at Saint Lucy’s Catholic Church, the altar boys used to ring a little golden bell when the priest raised the host. I watched from my wooden pew and wondered if that was the moment when the miracle happened, when the host changed from bread to flesh. …

No Enterprise

Warning: This essay contains a very minor spoiler (not plot significant) for the third book in the Bloody Jack series. I’m in the movie theater watching Star Trek: Beyond. I haven’t gone in blind, and I’m finding much to complain about. But although my mind is churning on dialogue problems and weird plot choices, my …

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 …

Colorless Green Ideas Crashed My Car
or
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 …

How to Believe in Yourself

I got a fortune cookie last time that said “Believe in yourself and others will too.” That’s probably true, but it’s not very helpful as advice. Because if you don’t believe in yourself, how can you start? People who already believe in themselves will say, “Just do it. Just believe in yourself.” But this is …

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 …