How do you find the time to write? How do you keep momentum? How do you deal with the horror of showing anyone a single sentence of your work-in-progress? The answers remain fun and easy, and author Elizabeth Sims will take your hand, dispel your worries, and show you how it's done in this stress-free guide to accomplishing your dream of writing your book.In You've Got a Book in You, Elizabeth is that encouraging voice guiding you through the entire process, from finding the right time and place to gathering all of your creative tools to diving right in and getting it done--page by page, step by step. It's easier than you think, and it all starts right here, right now.

    His tips are always realistic, accessible, and sticky. It's not just talk, this is productivity advice that will change your life."Jocelyn K. Glei, author and Founding Editor, 99UWe are living in an age of unprecedented creative stimulation--via the internet, social media, all-pervasive technology, and an "always on" working culture.Which means we are living in an age of unprecedented distraction from focused creative work--from all the same sources.First, computers and the internet transformed the work we did at our desks. Then along came smartphones to transform our social lives and make our work mobile.Now we have our work, our network, our media, and our social media with us wherever we go. Augmented Reality (AR) is layering more and more virtual elements over the physical world we inhabit, and Virtual Reality (VR) promises us escape to unlimited virtual worlds.The pace of change is exciting, overwhelming, and unstoppable.And creators are increasingly discovering a downside to the brave new world: countless distractions and interruptions  endless email  pressure to keep up  anxiety about falling behind  difficulty concentrating  aches and pains from too much time at the keyboard  Dig a little deeper, and the biggest concern for many creatives is a nagging sense that their most important work is being left undone.If you're excited by the opportunities of the creative age, but worried about the effect of all those interruptions and digital distractions on your creative work, Productivity for Creative People has been written for you.For the past twenty years creative coach Mark McGuinness has helped hundreds of creatives like you to overcome these challenges.A poet and creative entrepreneur, he is the author of Motivation for Creative People and Resilience: Facing Down Rejection and Criticism on the Road to Success. He is also a co-author of the bestselling books from 99U, Manage Your Day-to-Day and Maximize Your Potential.Mark's latest book, Productivity for Creative People, is a collection of insights, tips, and techniques to help you carve out time for your most important work - while managing your other commitments. All the solutions he shares have been tested with real people in real situations.You will learn: How getting organized can make you more creative  Why multitasking doesn't work  How to tell if you're really overloaded - and what to do about it  The importance of panicking early  How doing nothing can make you more productive  The crucial difference between incubation and procrastination  How to carve out time for your most important creative work  Why boredom is necessary for creativity  What to do about all that email  How to nap like a NASA pilot  A simple technique to reduce smartphone addiction  Productivity for Creative People is the perfect guide to creating extraordinary work without (necessarily) disappearing to a cabin in the woods,

    In this collection of anecdotes, lessons, quotes, and prompts, author and writing teacher Barbara Abercrombie provides a delightfully varied cornucopia of inspiration — nuts-and-bolts solutions, hand-holding commiseration, and epiphany-fueling insights from fellow writers, including Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners and Abercrombie’s students who have gone from paralyzed to published.

    Everywhere you turn, publications seem to follow different rules on everything from possessive apostrophes to hyphens to serial commas. Then there are all the gray areas of punctuation--situations the rule books gloss over or never mention at all. At last, help has arrived.This all-in-one reference from grammar columnist June Casagrande covers the basic rules of punctuation plus the finer points not addressed anywhere else, offering clear answers to perplexing questions about semicolons, quotation marks, periods, apostrophes, and more. Better yet, this is the only guide that uses handy icons to show how punctuation rules differ for book, news, academic, and science styles--so you can boldly switch between essays, online newsletters, reports, fiction, and magazine and news articles.Style guides don't cover everything, but never fear! This handbook features rulings from an expert "Punctuation Panel" so you can see how working pros approach sticky situations. And the second half of the book features an alphabetical master list of commonly punctuated terms worth its weight in gold, combining rulings from the major style guides and showing exactly where they differ. With The Best Punctuation Book, Period, you'll be able to handle any punctuation predicament in a flash--and with aplomb.

    It has little to do with the rigid daily calendar diary you may have kept as a child or the factual travelogue you wrote to recall the Grand Canyon. Instead, it is a tool for tapping the full power of your inner resources.The New Diary is as much for those who already keep a journal as it is for those who have never kept one. It does not tell you the "right" way to keep a diary; rather, it offers numerous possibilities for using the diary to achieve your own purposes. It is a place for you to clarify goals, visualize the future, and focus your engergies; a means of freeing your intuition and imagination; a workbook for exploring your dreams, your past, and your present life.It is for everyone seeking concrete methods for dealing with personal problems. It is for women and men interested in achieving self-reliance and inner liberation, for artists and writers seeking new techniques for overcoming blocks to creativity.

    Living Out Loud is the perfect prescription for a creative jump start to your life. Included are games, projects, activities, crafts, postcards, and playful ideas that will send you off on an exciting adventure, where you'll discover inspiration around and within you.

    Featuring timeless, innovative, and concise writing strategies and focused exercises, this book is the ultimate battle plan and more - it's Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" for novelists. Tactics and exercises are provided on idea generation and development, character building, plotting, drafting, querying and submitting, dealing with rejection, coping with envy and unrealistic expectations, and much more.

    Uninspired and lifeless, we wonder what happened. Was the author in a hurry? Did she have a bad year? Has he lost interest altogether?Something similar is true of a great many unpublished manuscripts. They are okay stories that never take flight. They don't grip the imagination, let alone the heart. They merit only a shrug and a polite dismissal by agents and editors.It doesn't have to be that way. In The Fire in Fiction, successful literary agent and author Donald Maass shows you not only how to infuse your story with deep conviction and fiery passion, but how to do it over and over again. The book features:Techniques for capturing a special time and place, creating characters whose lives matter, nailing multiple-impact plot turns, making the supernatural real, infusing issues into fiction, and more.Story-enriching exercises at the end of every chapter to show you how to apply the practical tools just covered to your own work.Rich examples drawn from contemporary novels as diverse as The Lake House, Water for Elephants, and Jennifer Government to illustrate how various techniques work in actual stories.Plus, Maass introduces an original technique that any novelist can use any time, in any scene, in any novel, even on the most uninspired day...to take the most powerful experiences from your personal life and turn those experiences directly into powerful fiction.Tap into The Fire in Fiction, and supercharge your story with originality and spark!

    Let it spark your imagination and remind you that your creative possibilities are truly endless.

    It is the product of preparation and effort, and it's within reach of everyone who wants to achieve it. All it takes is the willingness to make creativity a habit, an integral part of your life: In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative. In The Creative Habit, Tharp takes the lessons she has learned in her remarkable thirty-five-year career and shares them with you, whatever creative impulses you follow -- whether you are a painter, composer, writer, director, choreographer, or, for that matter, a businessperson working on a deal, a chef developing a new dish, a mother wanting her child to see the world anew. When Tharp is at a creative dead end, she relies on a lifetime of exercises to help her get out of the rut, and The Creative Habit contains more than thirty of them to ease the fears of anyone facing a blank beginning and to open the mind to new possibilities. Tharp's exercises are practical and immediately doable -- for the novice or expert. In "Where's Your Pencil?" she reminds us to observe the world -- and get it down on paper. In "Coins and Chaos," she provides the simplest of mental games to restore order and peace. In "Do a Verb," she turns your mind and body into coworkers. In "Build a Bridge to the Next Day," she shows how to clean your cluttered mind overnight. To Tharp, sustained creativity begins with rituals, self-knowledge, harnessing your memories, and organizing your materials (so no insight is ever lost). Along the way she leads you by the hand through the painful first steps of scratching for ideas, finding the spine of your work, and getting out of ruts into productive grooves. In her creative realm, optimism rules. An empty room, a bare desk, a blank canvas can be energizing, not demoralizing. And in this inventive, encouraging book, Twyla Tharp shows us how to take a deep breath and begin!

    In You Are a Writer, Jeff Goins shares his own story of self-doubt and what it took for him to become a professional writer and best-selling author—and the principles he’s learned from seeing many others do the same. He gives you practical steps to improve your writing, get published, and build a platform that puts you in charge. This book is about what it takes to be a writer in the 21st Century. You will learn the importance of passion and discipline and how to show up every day to do the work. You Are a Writer will help you fall back in love with writing and build an audience who shares your love. It’s about living the dream of a life dedicated to words.

    Rethinking the usage guide for the twenty-first century, Pinker doesn’t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose. In this short, cheerful, and eminently practical book, Pinker shows how writing depends on imagination, empathy, coherence, grammatical knowhow, and an ability to savor and reverse engineer the good prose of others. He replaces dogma about usage with reason and evidence, allowing writers and editors to apply the guidelines judiciously, rather than robotically, being mindful of what they are designed to accomplish. Filled with examples of great and gruesome prose, Pinker shows us how the art of writing can be a form of pleasurable mastery and a fascinating intellectual topic in its own right.

    Also included is a bonus section of 100 free (and almost free) ways to promote your ebook.+ How to write a novella in 24 hours+ How to start building your empire+ How long should a story be?+ How to write a bestselling novel on your iPhone+ The secret to making a book cover (that mostly doesn’t suck) in 10 minutes or less+ Why you're staring at a blank screen+ One Weird Trick to Boost Your Creativity+ Your worst idea may be your greatest+ Managing criticism+ The Curse of a Creative Mind+ 100 free (and almost free) ways to promote you ebook

    When showing our characters’ feelings, we often use the first idea that comes to mind, and they end up smiling, nodding, and frowning too much.If you need inspiration for creating characters’ emotional responses that are personalized and evocative, this ultimate show-don’t-tell guide for emotion can help. It includes: Body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for 130 emotions that cover a range of intensity from mild to severe, providing innumerable options for individualizing a character’s reactions A breakdown of the biggest emotion-related writing problems and how to overcome them Advice on what should be done beforedrafting to make sure your characters’ emotions will be realistic and consistent Instruction for how to show hidden feelings and emotional subtext through dialogue and nonverbal cues And much more! The Emotion Thesaurus, in its easy-to-navigate list format, will inspire you to create stronger, fresher character expressions and engage readers from your first page to your last.

    Learn to recognize the bad guys that maintain your hoarding behavior and meet the good guys who will motivate you and put you on the path to change.Features of this book include:-Self-assessments to determine the severity of the problem-Tips and tools for organizing your possessions and filing your paperwork-Strategies for changing unhelpful beliefs about your possessions-Behavioral experiments to reduce your fear of anxiety and fear of discarding.