Lately, most of my active project work has involved mapping content to parts, chapters, and sections of books. In other words, figuring out what a particular book should contain and in what order. People get stuck here. It's overwhelming. You need a solid process or you're going to get lost

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree," Lincoln said, "and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." Good advice for 19th-century lumberjack Presidents. Bad advice for writers. Chop first. Chop a whole cord of wood. Then reach for the whetstone. Even better, chop a whole grove

Chronic respiratory issues kept the young Patrick O'Brian out of school and sometimes landed him in a hospital bed. As a result, the precocious boy spent many hours alone growing up, bored out of his mind and desperate for an escape. Naturally, he turned to books and magazines. (This is

"Everything I do is the most important thing I do," the actor Mads Mikkelsen told an interviewer, continuing: Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be

Before I became a full-time writer, I worked as an acquiring editor for a number of years. While I don't advise grinding away in book publishing as a prelude to your professional writing career, you'd certainly learn a few valuable lessons no MFA program will teach. Being a successful editor

In the documentary I Need You To Kill, Pete Lee uses "flash" to refer to the way a stand-up comic captures an audience in the first moment on stage. As Lee explains, winning the audience over with terrific flash means you can coast for several minutes on goodwill alone. Whiff

Normally, I curate my morning reading stack based on "readability." In the morning, I'm fresh, for all of an hour or two anyway. Why not make the most of it? Toughest reads first. It's all downhill from there. By the afternoon, my capacity for mental labor is significantly curtailed. Mostly,

Writers worry about the wrong things. Take a lesson from film producers. The cardinal rule of making movies is to get every red cent up on that screen. Don't waste a penny on anything viewers won't notice. It's a relief to realize that movies aren't real. The illusion ends at

In his newsletter, Mason Currey, author of Daily Rituals, shares writing advice from the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek: It’s psychologically impossible for me to sit down [and write], so I have to trick myself.Like jumping out of an airplane—presumably—commencing a writing session can trigger a panic