Remember the talking dogs in the Pixar movie “Up?” If you haven’t seen it, the dogs are outfitted with a device that translates their thoughts and barks into human language so we can hear what’s going on in their heads, to great comic effect. One running joke is that whenever a squirrel is nearby, every other thought vanishes. All of […]
Writing
Where Do You Go for Inspiration?
Tracking Your Muse’s Favorite Hangouts What are you doing when the ideas start flowing in your brain? Where do new insights strike? When you sit down and the writing is fluid and productive, where have you been in the hours and days preceding? Those are the places that your Muse thrives. The Muse is a short-hand label for those […]
What Inspires Your Writing?
Getting To Know Your Muse Inspiration may appear in dreams. New ideas or complete phrases might pop into your head when you’re doing the dishes. Or, you’ll be in the shower when you suddenly think of a wonderful approach for something you’re writing. Our best ideas seem to come from places beyond our intentional control. That’s probably why the Greeks personified inspiration in the […]
Writing Fast and Slow
What a Behavioral Economist Can Teach Us About Writing In this post, I’m going to blatantly steal the concept of two selves from Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow to explain our inner writing processes. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is a wonderful introduction to the vagaries of human decision-making. The book outlines a fictional construct […]
Confessions of an Unlikely Control Freak
During the course of writing a book, you learn a great deal about yourself as well as your topic. You confront demons of doubt. You learn how to power through distractions and procrastination. You dig deep and discover insights you didn’t even realize you had. As the book makes its way through publication and launch, […]
Behavioral Writing Sciences
In 2002, a psychologist (Daniel Kahneman) won a Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. Yes, you read that correctly. A psychologist won a prize in economics, by studying the imperfect, human variable in economic equations. Kahneman is a pioneer in the field of behavioral economics: a mash-up of psychology, neuroscience, and economics. It examines how people make decisions in the real […]