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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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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Why Most People Never Write Their Book. Everyone has time to write a book. I’ve personally written over 130 in seven years, many of them while I had a full time pastor job. To be transparent, at least a dozen of them were pretty short. But still… So why can’t you write one? What’s the
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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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The Reason for My Publishing Company. The Relentless Pursuit of Better Truth. Why do you do what you do? Do you know? Why do you do what you do when you first wake up? After that? After breakfast? At work? After work? Before bed? And at all
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Writing About the Sublime. Does Writing About the Sublime Produce Sublime Writing? Robert Greene is interesting because human behavior is interesting. At least to me. My friend, Alex, a cool, just left of center (but too center for his leftist friends) worked at a cool book shop in St. Louis. We became friends in the
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The Art of the Memoir. My favorite book of all time is Open. It’s a memoir. But it revolves around a strange central tension: Andre Agassi hated tennis. “I play tennis for a living even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion and always have.” Now suddenly the story has
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