15 Writing Tips & Touchstones to Return to Each Time Your Momentum Slows or Stops

No matter how much you love a writing project — whether a novel, anthology of short fiction or poetry, memoir, screenplay, non-fiction book, series or course — sometimes after the initial buzz of inspiration and flurry of work, things shift. Maybe you hesitate because of doubt or that nagging feeling that what you’re doing is no good and that unease filters into your work.

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Rainer Maria Rilke on Trusting in Nature, Loving Small Things & Living Questions

In the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life, …even more than I was in Paris, where everything echoes and fades away differently because of the excessive noise that makes Things tremble. Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they […]

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Anne Enright’s Finest 10 Tips for Writing Fiction

In this humble offering before the next longer post, author Anne Enright, who was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for her novel, The Forgotten Waltz, and won the Man Booker Prize for her novel, The Gathering, shares ten writing tips gleaned from her fiction writing […]

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Find Clarity & Presence with a Swift Meditation for Busy Creatives

If you’re feeling a little mentally clouded, a touch hazy in the head, and want to liberate yourself from this place, so you can get on with the work — with writing, creating, and making your art — one swift means to clarity and calm is to practice this simple meditation technique each time you feel overwhelmed, stressed-out or in […]

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9 Ways to Make Peace with the Inner Critic

No matter if your creative confidence sings from rooftops or hides in the darkest garret, rise above the rantings of your critical voice and make peace with your inner critic with these techniques. Speak Kindly to Yourself “Every time you judge yourself, you hurt yourself,” as Brazilian lyricist and novelist, Paulo Coelho once said, a statement that is true on many levels, and […]

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15 Tools Inspired by Eastern Wisdom to Find Stillness in a Storm Part II

“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realise it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become asource of beauty, joy, and strength, […]

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Madeleine L’Engle on the 3 Most Important Things for Writers

“I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think […]

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