Brainstorm

How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?

Whatever else happens, stay busy. (I always lean on this wise advice, from the seventeenth-century English scholar Robert Burton, on how to survive melancholy: “Be not solitary, be not idle.”) Find something to do—anything, even a different sort of creative work altogether—just to take your mind off your anxiety and pressure. Once, when I was strug

Eventually, my brain goes on strike. My brain says: You need to feel better about yourself. You need to put yourself in a situation where you can succeed more days than not, and the times you feel most successful are when you are sitting quietly at your desk, doing your work, writing your books, contemplating your characters, thinking about the why