Writing projects have a beginning, middle, and end. And each phase calls for a different schedule.
Category Archives: Writing
Helping Readers Succeed at Behavior Change: What Writers Need to Know
Besides knowing what to do, readers want to know why they’re doing it and how to start. When our writing touches people on all these levels — instruction, insight, and next action — our odds for success improve.
Writing for Insight and Behavior Change — Nathaniel Branden on the Joys of Sentence Completion
Sentence completion encourages you to bypass your internal censors and express pre-conscious thoughts and feelings. In addition, you can turn vague intentions into concrete plans.
The Rhetoric of Reperception: 8 Paths to Creative Thinking
“…patterns of writing enact patterns of thinking, that by finding and practicing ways of writing we can literally think different things.”
Remembering Robert Pirsig’s ’Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’
If you truly understood Quality, Pirsig wrote, you would live each moment of your life differently. You would handle the material details of your life with exquisite care. You would even repair your motorcycle in a way that benefits all living beings.
Writing as Spiritual Practice: Cultivating Deep Humility
Every time I finish a piece of writing, I see again the terrifying truth: Reality transcends anything that I could possibly say about it.
Writing as Spiritual Practice: Organizing for Creativity
Creativity happens when we make new connections between existing ideas. We can organize for these “aha” moments by collecting ideas, revising them, and testing them.
Writing as Spiritual Practice: Headlong Into the Abyss
Writing and meditation practice both call for the courage to face nothingness, endure changing moods, show up every day, and transcend ourselves.
Three Books That Changed My Life
Surprisingly, it’s often possible to reduce a 50,000- or 100,000-word book to a single page or paragraph of pure power. That’s enough to capture the essence that matters to you.
The Art of Crap Detection
We are born into foolishness, and precious few are the voices that call this fact to our attention—let alone point a way out.
DOUG TOFT 