Archive for the 'Useful' Category

How Jesus Unblocked My Writer’s Block and Freed Me to Write–for Good

“We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.” – Thomas Merton All art, writing included, is built on ideas. The size of those ideas can’t be measured,
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A Word for Writers on Healthy Integration (or More Accurately, the First Word of Likely Many More).

“It’s always the vulnerable heart that breaks broken hearts free.”   I read a new book recently and it changed me. It helped me realize something I hadn’t before. Books often do that, of course, but not in a quite so fundamentally altering way. You know how when new information comes, there’s always that period of instability before you can even
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My #1 Tool for Productive Writers, Part 1

“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open up a vein.” – Walter Wellesley Smith For a long time, I believed the hype about being a more productive writer. I thought the usual advice about setting goals, getting on a schedule and visualizing was right on. But I think for some of us it’s not enough. There are deeper
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How to Be a Great Edit

  I know it’ll come as a shock to some of you, but as much as the writing process is about staying in the work until you’ve said everything you need to say, the editing process is all about staying in the posture of listening. Once again, I’m stealing advice from Donald M. Murray’s excellent essay on the practice and
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Doubts and Distresses be Damned

The difficulty of consistency in writing is greatly exacerbated by authors fearing that the situations and characters in their heads aren’t quite unique enough or imaginative enough. And this angst can effectively kill an author’s enjoyment of the daily work. The mountain of their vision seems too high to climb. Yet let them close their eyes to the hill and simply
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