4 expert tips for writing more in 2025
😎 We’re back and better-rested than ever
Issue #239: jungle gym careers, Billie Holiday, and questioning your defaults
“Writing forces you to hear your thoughts,” goes one of my favorite tweets. “It is a confrontation with yourself.”
One of my resolutions this year — and maybe one of yours — is to write more. (Thankfully, there’s a platform for that.) Making space in your life (and your mind) to actually get your ideas and experiences down, though, is harder than it sounds. In a story I’ve revisited a few times over the years, writer and illustrator Sophie Lucido Johnson lists her tips for getting out of your own way. I’ll be carrying these with me in 2025…
- Confront the Mirror Monster, the voice in your head that says things like “no one will ever care about what you’re writing.” One tactic: Don’t reread what you’ve written until you’ve finished a Bad First Draft. Novelist Eileen Pollack calls this a “zero draft,” which I like because it sounds attainable. Just get something down, and then you can improve it.
- Stop downhill. Stop writing when you’re excited to keep going, not when you’re stuck — so when you reopen that doc, you have a clear next step.
- Set a timer. The other monster in your head might say “I don’t have time for this!” To vanquish this monster, try the pomodoro method. Set a timer for 25 minutes. Don’t let yourself Ctrl-T away from that doc until time is up.
- It’s just work. It’s sometimes helpful to view writing less as “creativity” and more as simply work. It happens one word and one sentence at a time. Henry Miller has a rule (quoted by Johnson): “When you can’t create, you can work.”
🔥 1 sentence, 1 story
- Your career is not a ladder — it’s a jungle gym. (Matt Kornfield)
- Overheard at senior homes: the lyrics to Billie Holiday’s “Easy Living” (Loren Kantor)
- Don’t rush to judge your past self — they were doing their best with the information they had at the time. (Rikard A. Hjort)
- I love this list of unexpectedly specific life tips from Sasha Chapin: “Being silly is a gift. You un-taboo silliness for everyone around you.”
❓ A dose of practical wisdom: on resolutions
One of the best resolutions you can make is to simply start questioning your defaults: the routines, behaviors, and mindsets you find yourself naturally falling into. Most of these are somewhat arbitrary, and changing a few of them, even in subtle ways (a new path for your midafternoon walk, a tweaked morning routine) may lead to a better life.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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