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
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 […]
The Writer’s Process: Just Released
Is writing part of your job? Your dream? Do you struggle to find subjects to write about, or time to do the work? The Writer’s Process is about the inner game of writing. It applies lessons from cognitive science, together with hard-earned knowledge from the trenches. Here are just a few of the people whose writings or research […]
A Guide to the Writing Process
When we summon a mental image of a writer, we envision the act of drafting: putting the words down on paper. But the writing process extends far beyond the time drafting. Authors also assemble research, think deeply about topics, and create outlines before they draft. Many drafts require numerous revision cycles. The act of writing the draft is like the […]
