Writing Tips

Wordsworth did it. Rousseau. Blake. Hemingway. Woolf. Science fiction writer Orson Scott Card even recommended it to aspiring writers back in 1990, saying: "[It's] worth the time to take an hour's walk before writing. You may write a bit less for the time spent, but you may find that you…

Who do Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson, and Gregg Braden go to when they have a book launch? If you guessed their publisher—that monster juggernaut Hay House—you'd be wrong. The answer is Peggy McColl. Peggy is known as the "Millionaire Author Mentor." I had the great fortune to listen to her…

Now that so many books are going digital, it makes sense to consider offering an audio version of your book. People don't always have time to read, but they can listen to an audiobook during their commute or workout. The biggest advantage of doing an audio recording of your book…

Is this the worst time in history to be a writer? Dr. Lewis Birdseye, former professor at Columbia University, suggested so in his talk on the meaning of literature for Bandon Library on 20 April 2015. Although he amended his comment to refer to "traditional writing," his premise stood: Pages…

Is money like water? Economist John Maynard Keynes believed so. One of his breakthrough ideas was to model wealth as a circular flow. It was not enough just to make money; money also had to be spent freely for the economy to grow. A healthy economy would avoid blocking this "circular flow…

I've always been mystified by the divide between literary writing and commercial writing. It's the difference between The Da Vinci Code and The Sea. One won the Booker Prize, but the other sold over 80 million copies. Which book was the real success? The one the critics adored but the…

Seven months ago, I assured myself that I'd get 2 books finished before I took time off to have my daughter. Surely a book every 3 months was reasonable. After all, I'd been known to write 100 pages a week—under pressure, of course. What I didn't count on was baby…

My partner asked me a question yesterday that I couldn't answer: "Isn't it a tad ironic," he said, "for writers to join writing clubs?" I had no idea what he meant. "Well," he continued, "clubs seem to be the antithesis of what being a writer is about. Writing is all about…

Every writer has a handful of books that have helped him or her along the tough journey to becoming a writer. I can still remember my battered red Roget's Thesaurus that sat on my shelf alongside my stereo back when I was a teenager. I'd had the misfortune of an…

Sometimes I wonder where I got the snobbery to believe that books published electronically aren't "real" books. If ebooks were real books, I'd already be the best-selling author I dreamed of being. After all, my ebooks on dating and relationships are read all over the world. They've sold thousands of…