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You’ve probably heard about Amy Chua, the so-called Tiger Mom. A few weeks ago she had a firestorm of publicity around her book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which she boasts of her authoritarian and coercive parenting methods, which include not only insisting that her daughters follow a narrow course of “success-oriented”…

Success can bring a sense of loss, as Joan Bolker eloquently notes in Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: “How do we deal with the fact that there is sadness as well as joy about each major step we take forward – including finishing a doctoral degree? You may expect that you will…

A couple of weeks ago, I was depressed and underproductive for a few days. It was mainly due to the Arizona shootings, but also some personal stuff. I was a blue study.

To inspire you at the beginning of the New Year, I’m sharing (with permission) an email I recently got from someone who recently quit a job where she was being mistreated. Can’t really add much to it – the joy just leaps off the page. If you are reading this and are stuck in a…

Today’s topic, appropriately enough, is AMBIVALENCE. We tend to think of it as a small thing – “Should I have a donut or danish, I can’t decide!!!” – but in the realm of life choices, it’s huge. The cliche that you can’t move in two directions at once is absolutely true, and the people I’ve…

The New York Magazine article about the James Frey atelier cum literary sweatshop has performed a valuable service by highlighting not just the desperation of MFA students to get profitably published, but the willingness of MFA programs to let their students be exploited. Frey apparently decided to bypass the whole “1,000 monkeys working on 1,000…

Yes, I know about the evils of profit, and I’m obviously not arguing that you elevate it over all ethical concerns. But if you wish to be in business – which I believe is a valid personal and activist strategy, as the world needs more green businesses – then you need to focus on profit.…

NaNoWriMo participants aim to finish a 50,000 word novel in a single month – this month, in fact. The NaNoWriMo Website says NaNoWriMo is for, “everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.” While radical attempts at self-improvement generally don’t work – see,…

A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or maguffin) is “a plot element that catches the viewers’ attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction”. These are also often found in how perfectionist writers think about their work.