My friend Marilyn over at Simmer Till Done is getting ready for her daughter’s Bat Mitvah and has been in a fever of baking and crafting for the past couple of weeks. I ran into her at the coffee shop the other morning, where she taught me the secret of putting lists on pink paper so you can find…
Month: May 2009
Patience and preparation
Nothing epitomizes the phrase “Hurry up and wait” so much as publishing. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say publishing epitomizes the phrase, “Wait and hurry up.” Of all the attributes a writer can have, patience is among the most important (okay, talent helps). It doesn’t matter how much you wish it weren’t so, no…
How to: Productivity boot camp
I don’t have too much trouble getting my important work done. I enjoy what I do and look forward to the challenges as much as the opportunities. What I sometimes have trouble with is getting all the little pesky things accomplished, the pesky things that support my important work, and without which my important work…
Open the office door
Yesterday I talked about how we can sometimes get a little too narrow-minded in pursuit of goals, filtering out everything extraneous and “irrelevant.” As writers, though, we need to be exposed to new ideas, new thinking, alternative points of view, so that our work can stay interesting, worthwhile and meaningful. It can be hard…
The trap of “relevance”
Like most people, I’m on information overload, and I swear some days if one new fact enters my brain, three old facts are going to fall out, and those are probably three facts I need. So I try to focus my energy on attending to things that are relevant to me. But this can be…
Timing is everything . . . and nothing
Before I get to today’s post, read this interview with Dan Baum, former staffer for The New Yorker, now a freelancer. I agree with everything he says, which is how I know he’s brilliant. Pay particular attention to how he crafts every story pitch with a particular market in mind. I have been trying to…