Category: Writing

Cracking the Writer’s Block 1: Fear, Success and Life

A publishing colleague of mine who worked with our book printers was fond of telling me, “With all the things that can go wrong in producing a book, it’s amazing the ink ever hits the page.”

What’s true for printers is true in spades for writers. With so many reasons for writer’s block it’s a miracle anyone writes anything.
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Bobby Fischer Played Tennis

Bobby Fischer was a World Chess Champion who stood out as an eccentric genius in a field full of eccentric geniuses. As portrayed in the movie Pawn Sacrifice, he walked out of a chess match complaining about the lighting, ransacked his own hotel rooms looking for bugging devices, thought the Russians were watching him through his TV and believed the US government was listening to him through (wait for it) his dental fillings. Though his mother was Jewish, he was vocally anti-Semitic, holding to many conspiracy theories about Jews.
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How to Kill Off Writing

What’s the best way to hurt the local agriculture market in a country full of starving people? Indiscriminantly give away tons of free food. Relief organizations have learned the hard way that if they want to create a self-sustaining market of locally grown produce, they can’t always bring in truckloads of rice from other countries.
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Finding an Opening

In the musical 1776 there’s a classic scene in which Thomas Jefferson starts his solitary work of drafting the Declaration of Independence. Quill in hand, he scribbles down a line, looks at it, then crumples up the paper and throws it on the floor. He sits a moment, thinking, and then scribbles another line. Again, dissatisfied, he throws that on the floor. Then just as he’s about to make a third attempt, but before he even writes one word, he crumples up the paper and throws it down.
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