Until about six months ago I loved writing but always found it an agonising process. This might sound odd for someone who earned their living by writing and who has kept a journal for thirty years. But it’s true. I was so gripped by ‘not good enough’ worries that I found it painful to write and my writing practice suffered as a result. But I was driven to do it. I love writing, but it was almost a form of torture punctuated by enough waves of blissful creativity and flow to be addictive. [click to continue…]

When Cara Holland started writing her first business book, she needed people in her target market to feedback on content. Find out how she made the most of her local business network to recruit beta readers and worked with their feedback to improve her writing. [click to continue…]

You might think you have a publishing plan for your PhD but what if it’s the wrong one for you and your academic career? Academic publishing expert Simon Linacre, director of international marketing and development at Cabells, argues that being strategic is about where, how and when you publish your research – and this makes all the difference between scholarly success and failure.  [click to continue…]

Have you ever start a challenging writing routine or a new fitness regime only for it to fail a few days later? If so, don’t blame yourself – blame your brain! When you take on something that’s too ambitious or too complicated, you can trigger your brain’s fear centre – and this leads to overwhelm. But you can control your brain using two simple methods, both harnessing the power of neuroscience… [click to continue…]

Some people equate being highly prolific writers and researchers with producing dross. They prefer to constantly refine and perfect The One Idea they have. Perhaps because they think their idea is so special. Perhaps because they think they’ll never have another idea again. Either way, we believe that the best way to improve is to be unashamedly and un-apologetically productive – writing lots, failing lots, picking yourself up, writing more and improving.  [click to continue…]

If you’ve ever missed a deadline the planning fallacy may well be the culprit. It’s the tendency we have to underestimate the time it will take us to complete something – whilst knowing full well that similar tasks have taken longer in the past. It’s based in an innate biological bias towards optimism – but if you want stop missing your deadlines and start hitting them, it’s something you need to master – here’s how. [click to continue…]

How do writing scholars – people who write about writing, teach writing skills and research writing behaviours – get down to write themselves? To find out we spoke to academic Christine Tulley, author of a new and original Paris Review-style book on scholarly writing, How Writing Faculty Write. [click to continue…]

It’s official, being a highly prolific academic is the best indicator for scholarly success. Research looking at the careers of 2,800 of the world’s top scientists found that those who published the most papers also had the biggest breakthroughs and accumulated the most prizes. All well and good, but how do you get so prolific in the first place? [click to continue…]

Everybody writes differently but one thing is the same – the most productive (and least stressed-out) writers have all developed some kind of personal strategy to help them write. This is how you find yours.  [click to continue…]