Category: Productivity

How are You Moving Forward?

Or are you? Nathan Bransford, TVWriter™’s favorite publishing know-it-all, has a few words for us about stress, creativity, and hunkering down.

by Nathan Bransford

The past year of the pandemic has felt like a time of stasis in so many ways. We’re physically isolated and we’re spending more time than ever indoors. Entire categories of friendship have melted away. Most of us are hunkering down and just waiting for this madness to pass, and yet the very act of waiting for some indeterminate date just makes the end feel farther away. read article

Get in tune with your writing goals

Nathan Bransford, TVWriter™’s favorite publishing know-it-all, has a few words for us about about setting and attaining our writing goals.

by Nathan Bransford

It’s starting to feel more like 2021 with every passing day, and I’m still in a goal-setting frame of mind as I think about what’s next for my creative life and business. read article

$3.9 Million Reasons Not to let Rejection Get You Down

Take a good look at the pic above by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Originally intended as the cover image for The Blue Lotus, the fifth book in Hergé’s Tintin series, the publisher rejected it because it would cost too much to reproduce.

Well, last week 85 years after the said publishers had it redrawn for publication, this painting –  complete with fold marks from being stored who knows where for over three quarters of a century, sold at a Paris auction for just a shade under $4,000,000. read article

Alexander Chee on Overcoming Writers Block

This excellent article presents a very interesting – and new – way of regarding that old bad boy of writing – Writers Block.

by Alexander Chee

Ideal with writers’ block several times a year, usually in the form of other people’s writers’ block. Specifically, I find myself every year with a few students trying and failing to write their stories for class. Teaching creative writing inside of a liberal arts institution means putting creativity on a clock — the quarter or semester — and over the 25 years I’ve been teaching writing, I’ve learned my blocked students are usually high-achieving young people who are used to being able to power their way through a paper, get the answers, get the grade and move on. Fiction writing doesn’t really work that way.

That said, we know clocks can work. To wit: the number of people who say they thrive on a deadline. read article

Don’t ever ask whether you should keep writing

Nathan Bransford, TVWriter™’s favorite publishing know-it-all, has a few words for us about every writer’s nightmare scenario.

by Nathan Bransford

By far the most common question I get when I’m working with authors is “will this sell?” (Spoiler: this is impossible to answer). read article