I woke up in the middle of the night before our most recent Inklings Book launch with these three words bouncing around my mind - grit, empathy, and vision. Sometimes the answer to a question I've been wrestling shows up this way. The question? Why is creative writing important, in a world filled...
How often do you look up from the various fires you’re fighting and wonder: am I doing life right? With life moving at a million miles an hour, it’s not surprising that we yearn for a different...
When you ask a friend or advisor for feedback, you're both up against a number of challenges. Your advisor: Doesn't know all the ideas you've tried and tossed out Hasn't researched, thought, and...
“distringit librorum multitudo” (the abundance of books is distraction) – Seneca Even though he didn’t live in our age of information overload, Seneca had the foresight to see that too much is...
My wish? To be mentored by Madeleine L'Engle. In my twenties, I wrote a letter to Madeleine L'Engle. I knew the chances of hearing back from her were very low. She was busy and surely couldn't...
Do you have enormous goals on your mental or physical to-do list such as: Learn how to podcast Write a novel Run a half-marathon Learn to play the guitar Projects such as these beg the question:...
How often do you think about your thinking? Thinking patterns are largely invisible. For efficiency's sake, our brains learn the steps of various thinking tasks and run them on autopilot. For...
I used to think that in order to do improv you had to be funny. By funny, I meant witty. I meant the kind of person who tosses off one-liners on Twitter that make people fall off their chairs...
Last week, I challenged my team of Inklings mentors to each invent his or her ideal creating space. I gave the group five minutes, and asked them to use one side of their paper to document their...
If I asked you to pick up a pencil and free-write about an experience that caught your interest in the past day or so, chances are, it would take you a while to come up with an idea. How many of our...
