A mensch (from the Yiddish, rhymes with wrench) is a person of high integrity; a serious, dependable person. While it originated as a gendered term, it’s gone beyond that. There are plenty of women who are mensches and plenty of men who are not. If you are a mensch, and you ask for my help,…
You just drafted Chapter 2. You shared it with your developmental editor, who suggested a bunch of changes. What do you do next? Disciplined writers start work on Chapter 3. Undisciplined writers repeatedly revise work already written — a habit of continual polishing. That’s a habit I want you to break. Continual polishing is the…
Payton Pritchard is a solidly built 6-foot 1-inch guard on the NBA’s Boston Celtics. Nearly every time he appears in a game, he’s the shortest man on the court. In Sunday night’s game against the Philadelphia 76ers in Philadelphia, Game 4 of the first round of the playoffs, Pritchard scored 32 points in 35 minutes…
I work on book projects for hire. Nonfiction authors pay me to help with ideas, get coaching, edit their books, or ghostwrite their books. There are three approaches people take when reaching out to me. The three approaches Imagine my inbox, which is stuffed with all sorts of publishing news, people who want me to…
Newsletter 146. Writing trains minds, while outsourcing it to AI leaves you stupefied. Plus AI as writing collaborator, editors who upload your manuscript to AI, three people to follow, three books to read, and how you can establish that you’re not just data. Writing is thinking. AI can’t do that for you. “I didn’t really…
Each of us must now daily deal with organizational stupidity. It might be stupid policies at your job, stupid rules of your homeowners association, stupid government and tax policies, or the stupid way the health care system works. But the result is the same: a set of rules set up ostensibly for good and reasonable…
Newsletter 144. Why writers must embrace “less is more,” and what to do about it. Plus, how Shy Girl was outed as AI-generated, why AI illiterates will be unemployable, three people to follow and three books to read. Shorter I don’t know what’s wrong with what you wrote. But I know how to fix it….
Perfectionist tendencies are often the writer’s biggest obstacle. In the last few days I’ve met a memoirist who was stuck polishing her first chapter over and over and a thought leadership author who kept backing up and revising his primary model idea based on feedback from whomever he spoke with last. These writers seem intent…
Given the churn that’s going on now in technical fields, there are likely millions of formerly employed people who have been laid off and are asking, “Should I become a consultant?” This also applies to people who’ve retired or left a long-term job and aren’t quite ready to hang it up completely. If you’ve got…