Posts by Hillary
Cleveland Events: Saturday 4/23 and Sunday 4/24
Saturday, April 23, 10:00 a.m. to Noon in Cleveland, Ohio at Literary Cleveland at Lake Erie Ink, Hillary is presenting Joyful Writing Productivity. Inspiration exists and is available to everyone at any time. Under-productivity, procrastination, and blocks are solvable problems. The secret to achieving a state of near-perpetual inspiration (a.k.a., “flow”) is to switch from…
Read MoreHarper Lee, “Second Novel Syndrome,” and Situational Perfectionism
Harper Lee, author of the immortal To Kill a Mockingbird, died last week at 89. She never published another book except for Go Set a Watchman, which was published in 2015 in what many consider to be dubious circumstances. Lee may have suffered from second-novel syndrome, a form of procrastination in which an author becomes…
Read MoreWhy We’re Such Poor Appreciators of Our Own Work
Here is a delightful two-minute film from Derek Sivers which discusses why we often fail to fully appreciate our own work. It also explains why it’s a bad idea to compare your work with that of a famous person. Comparisons are perfectionist, but comparing yourself to someone famous is especially problematic because of what you’re…
Read More“If You’ve Made Them Cry, You’ve Succeeded In Getting Your Point Across.”
A Success Academy charter school teacher was caught on film harshly criticizing and publicly humiliating a first grader. She literally tore the girl’s classwork into pieces and flung them aside! The school is claiming that the incident was an exception, both for this teacher and the system in general. However, there’s plenty of testimony that…
Read MoreIf We Could Turn Back Time: Cher Models Nonperfectionism!
I’ve always loved Cher’s tweets: they’re so playful and sincere, even when she’s making a sharp political point, which she does often. So naturally, I loved this New York Times piece about her Twitter style: She pays little to no attention to rules of grammar, like punctuation or sentence structure, and she capitalizes many words…
Read MoreWhy “Positive Procrastination” is (Mostly) a Scam
Every week, it seems, someone publishes an article about how procrastination can be good for you. This week it’s The New York Times. I am all about using whatever productivity techniques work for you. But in my experience pro-procrastination techniques work for very few people, and are actually more likely to undermine your productivity than…
Read MoreHow John Scalzi Meets His Deadlines
This week, bestselling author John Scalzi blogged about how he’s going to meet his 2016 deadlines: “For me, the major problem is not writer’s block or plot issues or anything structural involving the novel; I generally don’t have problems with those once I start, and with this new novel, thankfully, I didn’t have any real…
Read MoreHow to Get Out of a Slump
I got a lovely note from a reader that included this passage (reprinted with kind permission): “For the last one and a half week I have been in kind of in a slump, disappointed after a school assignment I had trouble finishing. I thought I finally had my writing problem under control, but ended up…
Read MoreRussian Translation of 7 Secrets of the Prolific Now Available!
And it’s got an amazing cover! Thanks to the good people at Mann-Ivanov-Ferber for the translation.
Read MoreThe Joys of Being a Late Bloomer
This piece originally appeared on the blog of The Woman and the Owl Foundation, a fantastic group that, “explores and encourages the development of women spiritual leaders of all faiths and backgrounds through education, community, and support.” I also did a video interview with them which you’ll find here. Many thanks to Jessamine Dana for…
Read More