In working with Writers, as many of you know, I often place a lot of emphasis on framing the attention on very specific tasks. Our first Academic Muse eBook is all about that obviously. But there is IMMENSE power in going EVEN SMALLER. We can get even more specificker (yes that can be a word, if we really want it …
The fastest way to eliminate the drain of multitasking is turn off cellphones and email and The Google. But the deepest way is to resolve the emotional multitasking that is sapping our creative willpower. By which I mean, our inner sense of conflicting purpose, aim, and energy. When we write at cross-purposes, in a state of inner war, most …
Every writer should have one. If you’ve ever watched your day fritter away, then you know how frustrating it is to have some time available which then becomes a total wash. Or you know the feeling of working really hard but seeming to accomplish nothing. Or knowing exactly what you need to be doing, but somehow always finding yourself doing …
At the beginning of each semester, we academic writers often find ourselves planning out a course of action for a… course. But what about our writing? What’s the plan? Oftentimes the plan has one big item, or maybe a few, but there’s no plot, no sequence. In our very brilliant classes we go through a carefully designed order, but for …
Stretching leads to Writing Flexibility Could this possibly make writing flow easier and more naturally in the future? The ancients routinely trained their ability to argue any position. It was considered an art in itself, and no one was fit for intellectual pursuits before first training in these preliminaries, the Progymnasmata. Sometimes we offspring of the philosophers have lost contact with …
“So… what are you working on?” Most of us in academia get called on to give “the elevator pitch.” If you’re like me, when people ask that sometimes there’s this little freeze moment, or hiccup, or something—or it might actually be a dimensional shift where you skip to another universe, have a series of violent adventures that lead to …
As a grad student years ago, when I was a little down and out during my 3 years of anthropological research in Thailand, one of my greatest comforts was Henry Miller. What, you don’t know the feeling? Getting into these stewy, swampy marshes of inaction, wanting to do something meaningful with your life, but somehow unable to get started …