Don’t fix your Writing, Fix Your Attention Well of course we want to fix our writing. That’s part of writing. But it’s not the first place our attention should be going. That’s putting the cart before the horse. Before we go tackling the big challenges that show up in the content and form of our writing, we …
5 Cures for the Nothing New to Say, Done Before Syndrome in the Academic Writer
Do You Get This Thought? Your argument has been made before, or it’s obvious, or there is nothing original about the topic, and that maybe extends to you yourself, that maybe there is nothing about you that will cause them to pick you for publication, job, or tenure. It can go all different ways, dragging us down. It’s been done …
New Year’s Resolutions Suck (no offense)
But there is a way to create our Future Now I’ll be the first one to admit that I’m not socially normal. Do you, too, seem to be looking in on the collective behaviors of the humans like you’re an alien? That “abnormality” is fairly normal for academics in many fields, actually. We are observers, and got into academia because …
3 Big Don’ts Before Submitting Your Writing
Are you shooting yourself in the foot? When it comes to submitting your scholarly article for publication you might as well shoot yourself in the foot if you are not doing these three things. Why the violent metaphor? Well it’s just because these are 3 very easy things and so it’s really a crime against yourself …
Academic Mad Libs: The Idea-inator
An Exercise for a Sense of Play in Academic Writing And, for exploring unexpected possibilities in what we are thinking and writing about. This is a fantastic exercise that anyone can do and everyone can benefit from. Just yesterday my children were playing Mad Libs, and having a blast. If you don’t know this game, it …
How’s it Going? You Don’t Know!
Don’t get me wrong now: I’m a big fan of keeping track of how it’s going with our writing. I encourage all our writers to track time writing, or alternatively word counts, to be aware of the limiting thoughts that are slowing us down. It’s important to look out for the life conditions that breed perfectionism, stuckness, and “deer in …
5 Best Tactics to Get Writing When It’s Not Happening
I think we all know those moments when it seems we just can’t do it. Maybe we’ve been working a bit too hard lately. Maybe things have been really hectic. Maybe we have been on vacation for a little while. Maybe we let things slide a little too long. It could be anything, and often we don’t know the reason why. …
What am I trying to Say? Don’t ask that!
Narrow it down first. Ask, “What kind of thing am I trying to Say?” I’m sure at different times you’ve been writing, feeling you are missing the one thing that would make it so much easier to see how things fit together. The one thing that would help you decide what to include and what to cut. The one thing that would allow you …
What Busts Through our Limits? A Sense of Inevitability.
When we are down about writing, just replacing negative thoughts with positive ones is not enough. Sure, it can help a little—but those positive thoughts must feel real for it to help a lot. And so they must be based in something true and trustworthy. How do we find that truth in positive thoughts? Our desired outcome should …
The ONE thing behind our trouble writing
Jump Writer! Jump! Many of our writing troubles have one thing lurking behind them. Ok, it might not be the only thing, but more often than not it is the best thing to take a look at when we have been procrastinating, deferring, stalled, or zapped by a ray of almost-done-stasis-perpetual-motion-freeze-dimensionator. And what is that thing? Fear. But there is …