For Writers
Whether it’s sharing what I’ve learned about the craft or diving deep into the mental health hazards of our creative path, I love helping fellow writers.
Articles on Writing
Mental Health for Writers
We writers live and work in a unique convergence of terrible conditions optimized to make us miserable. What can we do about? Let’s find out.
Website: Your Writing Is Killing You
A fact-packed one-page site summarizing key research and techniques to help writers practice the mental hygiene we need.
Interviews and Speaking
I gave an interview on “How Authors Work”, a podcast from BetaBooks
I gave a presentation at Samuels Authorcon 2016 (Front Royal, Virginia)
Book: Your Writing Is Killing You (Forthcoming)
It’s not just you, fellow writer.
There’s solid evidence that the writing process itself is hazardous to your mental health.
I don’t just mean it’s difficult, or draining, or that you face the Resistance that Pressfield tackles in the War of Art. All true, but it gets worse: the precise mental habits you must cultivate as a writer, especially to tell strong stories, can also make you miserable.
How do I know? Because with very few exceptions, they’re the exact mental habits that the professionals implore us to reverse.
We’ll start with the obvious: isolation. You may already have noticed this one. “Oh, weird … writers tend to be depressed, and being alone makes you more depressed, but writers HAVE to spend hours and hours and hours all by themselves or they’ll never get anything written. Huh.”
But isolation’s only the beginning.
There are at least four more major mental habits that are both core to strong stories and corrosive to good lives.
In this book, we’ll explore these unique challenges that no one seems to talk about… and what we can do to both keep writing and start living.
Giving Back
My own writing life has been immeasurably improved by writing conferences and workshops, in multiple communities of welcoming writers. These resources are a small attempt to give something useful back.