How To Set Writing Challenges to Boost Productivity

When you write for yourself, it is tempting to overlook falling short of your goals. You don’t risk being chewed out by a supervisor or letting down a team, and no one has to know you haven’t produced as much content as you were planning.

The flexibility that comes from being your own boss is freeing and might be a major reason why you chose this path to begin with. But if you take too much advantage of this freedom, you will begin to suffer from a lack of production, leading to a lack of income—which, ironically, restricts your freedom.

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How To Increase Your Income as a Professional Author

Before now, you struggled to make enough money to pay your bills as a new writer, but with time, persistence, and hard work, you managed to drag yourself out of that phase.

Now you want to do a lot more than just pay bills.

You need to increase your current revenue so you can put money aside as savings on a regular basis. You’d also like to give yourself and your family a few treats from time to time, without having panic attacks. 

Not to mention, you also want to be able to afford that vacation you’ve been dreaming of so you can travel to exotic locations around the world.

Bottom line, you want to bring in more income as a professional writer and make a living from your writing, but you’re not sure if it’s possible or how it can be done.

Want to hear the good news? It’s possible!

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Summer Sanity: How To Survive Working from Home Through the End of Summer

Working remotely might seem as if it would be easy and productive, but maintaining focus can actually be difficult. In particular, working from home during the summer—when the kids are home from school and it seems like everyone else except you is out having fun—things are harder than ever.

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A Philosophy of Writing: How To See the Bigger Picture Behind Your Craft

The word “philosophy” means to be a friend of wisdom; to become wiser. In this context, a philosophy of writing refers to understanding and reflecting on your writing, with the goal of improving it. This inevitably entails questioning possible preconceptions and changing your mind. 

Let’s start with one such assumption: What is the first image you conjure up when you hear words such as “writer,” “author,” or “writing”? Likely, you would give a description such as “a person using a typewriter,” “a notepad and a pencil,” or “a person using a laptop.”

These are all perfectly valid and understandable responses. We often use such images to convey the concept of writing—indeed, on this very page you are now reading. The thing is, such images focus on writing as an activity, not as a process. In other words, they emphasize those parts of textual production that are related to practicalities: outlining, typing, or editing.

In a way, approaching writing only as an activity—that is, focusing only on its practical aspects—conditions us to forget about what precedes these practical stages. We often talk about the right time to write or how much one should write per day, and for good reason: These are crucial aspects of writing. But they’re not the only ones.

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