To get a monthly summary of these letters instead of weekly, please click this link. Hello there,Lately, several folks asked me about the steps involved in writing a book. In case you're wondering, I'll share a short story below. Arvashni had a story she needed to tell. When I first spoke with her, she said: “I can't even write a long email." That's normal! To navigate around that, we used my Clarify-Storify-Amplify process. Clarify Her story was rooted in her family’s history as part of the...

To get a monthly summary of these letters instead of weekly, please click this link and your wish will be honored. Last week, my husband and I caught an advanced showing of the documentary “LORNE, which is about the creator of Saturday Night Live (a comedy show in the United States). Initially, I was skeptical of this documentary about Lorne Michaels. Yet, I ended up surprised that I absorbed useful lessons from his work life. A lot of these lessons apply to both writing and life in general....

In the Paris Review, the writer Emmanuel Carrère talked about how he drafted a book that wasn’t working out. (That's pretty normal, by the way.) To say goodbye to his project and honor the effort he put into it, he wrote a letter to himself about what he had tried to do with the book. The process of writing about his ideas led him to a breakthrough, and he was able to finish. So, why did this work? My theory is that something called our "reticular activating system" (RAS) played a role. The...