March 2007

Going Cold Turkey “Go cold turkey: To undergo sudden and complete withdrawal from a habitual activity or behavior pattern.” By the time you read this, I will most likely be en route to or in New York City. For those of you who are not regular readers, I will explain briefly: I am going to perform […]

I stumbled upon an extremely well-written and informative article this week: 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web, by Mark Bernstein, which I encourage you to read in its entirety. Continuing to think about the topic I have focused upon the past couple of weeks, why so many folks are blogging these days, I was fascinated by his very first suggestion: “Write for a Reason.” He admonishes us to write not just about the mundane details of our lives and life experiences, but about why those details matter. Perhaps most importantly, he reminds us to write honestly and “for yourself; you are, in the end, your most important reader.”

Another recommendation that resonated with me is “[r]ead widely and well, on the web and off, and in your web writing take special care to acknowledge the good work and good ideas of other writers.” When I signed on this evening to write this post, I perused the past week’s entries from my colleagues here at Write Stuff, as is my custom. I was intrigued to find that, once again, my teammates and I seem to be “in synch.” d.challener wrote in his March 6, 2007, post, “The Need to Read,” that he has been, of late, in the “longest creative reading droughts of my adult life. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to read. It just seems that over the last several months my traditional reading times have dried up.”

I concur with Karen’s enthusiastic endorsement of Writer’s Digest. The insightful articles they publish always cause me to think in a new way about why I enjoy writing so much and how I might improve my written products.

Currently, in a feature entitled “Becoming Intimate with Your Own Creative Impulses,” author Julia Cameron is interviewed. After publishing my post last Sunday about why so many of us are spending significant amounts of time and effort blogging, I was particularly intrigued by her explanation of why she writes:

For me, writing is a way to metabolize life. It’s a way to make life more understandable, it’s a way to make life more comfortable, it’s a way to make life more interesting. It’s a way to make life more passionate. When I picture the writing life, what I’m talking about is a life where writing is your dominant response. People can learn to do that. They can learn when they have their feelings hurt to get on the page instead of on the telephone. They can learn to keep a notebook next to them and write when they’re in gridlock traffic.