Are you constantly distracted by your phone?

Have you found out the secret of overcoming or working through this?

Today I share some advice in a draft chapter from On Drafting, the writing manual you're helping me write.

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Who are the ghosts that haunt your writing space, or your mind as you're writing?

Is it Lydia Davis or Tolstoy? Dickens or someone I've never heard of?

Today's entry is another go at an introduction to On Drafting, the writing manual you're helping me write.

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Today, following up on my Guardian review of Elizabeth McCracken's writing manual A Long Game: How to Write Fiction, here are a few, slightly freer thoughts about it.

tl;dr - I recommend it. It's very good.

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Today I'm talking and writing about how to keep going with writing when you're feeling down.

I think this is something most writers face every single day, and these are some first draft thoughts on good reasons for going on.

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Today's subject is writing in the dark - what Donald Barthelme called (in a famous essay) 'the not knowing'.

I'm starting with an even more famous quote from Henry James, and talking about what it feels like to be lost and perhaps bewildered.

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Today I share three exercises that might work if you don't have any idea what to write next.

The first is based on something I do in Creative Writing workshops, encouraging students to write the worst dialogue ever.

The second comes out of a trip I paid to Foyles Bookshop in London.

And the third is inspired by the very inspiring Wes Anderson, and his plain yellow notebooks.

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What are my principles as a teacher of writing?

I tried to get them down on a single page, and succeeded.

There are five different principles, and here they are.

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Here I'm sharing a draft opening to my writing manual. It talks about different writers different ways of drafting. Perhaps one of them is similar to yours - but I'd be surprised if you drafted like Proust, Flaubert or Kerouac.

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Here's a bill of fare, a draft contents section, and a sneak preview of what's coming up in the next few weeks and months.

How does this compare to what you know about a book when you begin drafting it?

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Today's podcast is about who you are on the page. Is it the writer described in your blurb, or is it a person you've decided to be, for the purposes of what you're writing?

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