What Happens When You Don’t Finish Your Dang Rough Draft Before You Edit? A Lesson from the Choir Room. I’m a choir boy. I was raised by choir directors. I always try to sing in a local choir. There’s an analogy in choir rehearsing for us writers. I have a pet peeve. It’s when directors […]
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Why It’s Hard to Read Your Substack. It’s Not the Subject Matter. You’ve poured your soul into your blog post. You resisted the temptation to use AI. Your mom and two friends read it, but no one else does; and getting subscribers is hard. You can’t figure out why. I’ll tell you.
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Why It’s Hard to Believe You Could Get Good At Writing. It’s a Matter of Training in a Linear Progression. I’ve taken up ultra running. By that I mean the 100-mile race I’m going to run in three (maybe 5) years. That is, after I work up to a mile, and then two. Then three.
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God Does Things Today. And He’ll Be with You When You Write. Once, when I was teaching voice lessons in a musical theater program, I had a student who was curious about something I said. What I said was, “I felt like God said…” (followed by whatever it was). She looked puzzled. I don’t
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Motives for Writing: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. When You Need Support to Write What You’re Called to Write. Why do you write? You find yourself on the couch with a laptop on your lap, or at the desk, or wherever you write, and you’re actually typing words one after another into something
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A Way to Write Better that You Haven’t Tried. Confess Your Sin Then Write in the Spirit. I’ve written before that if you’re going to write, write in the Spirit. I pointed out then that Abraham Lincoln claimed that if he had six hours to chop down a tree, he’d spend four of them sharpening
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Have You Helped Someone Make the Transformation Your Book Promises? Part 2 of How to Sell Books. Last week I wrote about building platforms for your message and books. Let’s keep talking about it. Jim Murphy wrote a book, Inner Excellence, about mental toughness. It broke him and nearly killed him to write
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Every Great Book Makes One Promise. And Dangit, That Means ONE! I work with a lot of authors. I mean, a lot. Most of them suffer from the same thing: fear that they aren’t saying enough. They know many things. Things learned in painful ways. Lessons they don’t want to waste. Insights they bled to gain.
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How to Optimize Your Life for Writing. You’re Already Optimized for Something, Why Not Writing? I’m a writer and pastor, but my hobby these days is reconnecting with my opera roots. I got to perform in some local concerts last week that required a lot of singing six out of the seven days. It was
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Seeking Truth to Write About It. Some people know something, so they write about it. Then they want to keep writing, but they already said the thing they know. The work then is to seek out the truth and write again. Maybe you started a Substack and you were excited about
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