Seek funny leaps

Try This: Mark Bowden said a writer should always be working on the most ambitious thing he or she has ever done. What writing project would most stretch and excite you? Start now by using freewriting to help you.

I have some fellow writer friends who love to revise. It is in the rewriting, they like to say, that the true shape of their work emerges. It is the most rewarding, even pleasurable part of the process. I learned long ago when they said this to arrange my face, because it did not seem useful to let them see my thoughts writ large there, which were

One of the dangers of writing a book about writing is that it might be perceived to be of the how-to variety. This book is not that. A lifetime of writing has left me with one thing: the knowledge of how I do it. Or, to be completely honest, a knowledge of how I have done it. (How I will soon do it has to remain a continual mystery.) God save us fr

In Bird by Bird, the novelist Anne Lamott elegantly captures this rhythm of creation. “You find yourself back at the desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors,” she writes. “You don’t care about those first three pages; those y