Focus. This word keeps coming up for me often lately. How do you keep your focus on your business? How do you keep organized enough to keep your focus? What should you focus on? I’ve been grappling with this for months. I know I want to change the trajectory of my business. I’ve been telling colleagues my mantra is “To write what I love, and work for clients where respect is mutual.” I’ve written this down more eloquently, but the fact is I haven’t carried through with it. Instead, I spend hours each day procuring information to help freelancers, writers and freelance […]
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Critique Writing with Kindness
I feel like I can’t write anymore. This thought has been stuck in my head ever since I took a memoir workshop with a well-respected former editor of a national magazine. She had nothing good to say about my submission. She went through everyone else’s submissions line-by-line. She left mine for last. She gave a sweeping critique basically saying what I’d written wasn’t good and I should scrap it altogether. No positive feedback. I literally felt like a failure. My hope was to start writing my memoir book using some of the tools she would give us, but she only praised […]
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Tips to Overcome Writer’s Block
Tips to Overcome Writer’s Block For the first time, in a long time, I couldn’t write. Some people call it writer’s block. I never liked that term and in his book Writing Tools, 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, Roy Peter Clark (Poynter Institute) says we should think of this as a time of “rehearsal” or the process of “mental preparation,” but whatever it is, it’s definitely not good when you’re a writer. For those of us who make our living as freelance writers, the problem becomes exacerbated with looming deadlines – article for a publication (print or online) or content for a client. […]
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