An email arrived in my inbox the other day with a beautiful video attached. It came from someone I did not know, inviting me to participate in an event.
Ordinarily, I would tag the email to read later in the day. (I try to “time-block” handling requests like this.) But…
A familiar question came up in a writing workshop I led last week. A participant wanted to know how to publish the many stories he had accumulated during his unusual life. It’s a common and important question, and so hard to answer!
Many of my conversations with writers revolve around…
As children, we learn by trial and error. We fall, get up, and try again. Sometimes the mistakes are painful. We learn not to tug the cat’s tail or grab at hot pans on the stove.
We continue to learn from our mistakes as we grow. Remember your first full-time…
How long should a how-to (prescriptive nonfiction) book be? 100 pages? 200 pages? A quick read? A deep dive?
There’s no single correct answer.
…
Our crowded inboxes drive us nuts. We resent their intrusion on our lives and the pull they have on our attention when we’re trying to work.
Then we get frustrated when other people don’t respond to the emails we send them.
How many words do you look at each day? Think of all the text that you encounter: emails, Slack messages, news headlines, LinkedIn or Facebook posts, reports, books, articles, and more.
Research conducted in 2009 found that Americans saw or listened to an average of 100K words each day. …
As a prolific nonfiction reader, I ask two questions of each new book I encounter:
I can usually answer the first…
How audiobooks change as as readers, and as writers
A few years ago, ebooks were a hot topic of debate among the bookish. Were ebooks destroying our attention and killing the publishing industry? Or were they making books more accessible and increasing readership?
Now the buzz is about audiobooks. Audiobook…
What’s the most important attribute for a writer?
Facility with words, creativity, imagination, even empathy — all of these are important. They can be cultivated. The hardest thing to learn and live is the most important.
We need patience to build the skills …
… to write the book
……
Author, Writing Coach: Writing about Marketing, Technology, and Writing Itself (very meta). AnneJanzer.com
