1. Writing Pep Talk

2. Writing Style Zinsser – The Transaction

3. The one relationship that counts is that between you and your writing. If you feel good about what you’re working on, then you’re in good shape, and if you don’t feel good about it then you need to figure out what to change so that you do feel good about it. What you’re working on right now is what matters, not what you have written and not what you’re going to write

4. Writing is writing’s reward. The best part of story writing is to be working on a story in which you are wholeheartedly and wholemindedly engages. The support of friends, family, and even strangers can help, but finally you have to find your reasons for doing it in doing it.

5. Write for the good of the work – as opposed to writing for others of writing for yourself.

6. Serve your stories relentlessly by doing everything you can to make them as good as you can make them (i.e. letting others read them, trying to revise them to perfection, carrying out appropriate research instead of trying to fake it).

7. Write stories you want to live with. This isn’t always possible – or it’s hard to know if a story you’re working on will become one you want to live you. You have to write a number of stories that you need to cast off from yourself and not live with. But it’s useful to remind yourself that your reason for writing these things is because you want certain stories of your own to live in the world with you.

8. Write often enough that you miss it if you don’t do it. To have a real writing life, you must be writing at least as least this often. Going to your writing should seem a pleasure rather than a burden to you; if it isn’t a pleasure, then you need to shape up your writing life.

9. Demand of yourself that you grow in your ability, your ambition, your achievement. If you don’t feel like you’re getting somewhere in your writing, then you need to make some changes. Grow or rot, those are your choices. It is one of the happy functions of the writing workshop – the community of your writer-friends – to keep you growing.

10. On Writer’s Block I place one word slowly in front of the other, like learning to walk again after an illness. But the blank page with its hospital corners tempts me. I want to like down in its whiteness and let myself drift all the way back to silence.(FIND YOUR MUSE!)

11. Writing Practice Goldberg – Writing Down the Bones