Tweet Your muse. That nefarious, unpredictable, fickle elf (but don’t tell her that, I want to get on her good side!). Many writers say you don’t need one. Just put fingers to keyboard and type. Me? I need one. When I write when I’m fatigued, when I’m ill, when I’m uninspired, my work is kind of trashy. Ends up being deleted the next day. In my opinion, sick days are best for transcribing and editing. But there are secret ways I’ve learned to ease the muse out. It’s the reason why I’ve been bubbling up with ideas lately. I can’t…
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Tweet Hurray for daydreaming! It’s the thing you loved to do in school, but what you were most likely to get punished for. Well now there’s legitimate reason to zone off when bored. Yes, according to author Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine: How Creativity Works, it’s those moments when you’re dazing out the window that your getting the most work done. Perhaps all of us writers knew this intuitively. But Lehrer’s book provides actual research to back that statement up. In it, he describes the work of psychologist Jonathan Schooler and his research on daydreams and their benefits. And what…
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Tweet What’s one of the hardest battles you’ll fight as a writer? The battle within yourself. Working on an article recently, I found myself on the front lines defending my creative prose with an ardent editor. Unforgiving and rigid, she was on task to cut away my unnecessary words and fluffy copy for something more streamlined. It was a hard battle lost my friends. All the more so because that editor was me. Every writer has two sides of their brain that battles for attention. My right brain is the more feisty one relentlessly slipping in creative allegories for fun.…
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Tweet I’ve spent enough time studying the grooves of my ceiling to know that every creative person, writers included, needs to take risks and risk the repercussions afterwards. Just like you may have a flood of ideas and are eager to set each one free, you may spend nights like me staring at the ceiling bemoaning over your impulsivity for not being more discriminating. That comes with the territory. In the five years that I’ve spent freelancing, I’ve banged my head over my keyboard (figuratively) enough times to put Don Music to shame. (If you need a refresher, he’s the…