In the children’s book The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats a boy walks through his neighborhood after a snowfall and discovers the beauty there. At one point he breaks a branch from a tree and continues walking in the snow. Soon he looks back and observes his footsteps along with the groove the stick has […]
Earlier this year I coached author and professor Gary Neal Hansen through the process of writing a book proposal. We covered every element of a typical nonfiction book proposal except the writing sample. This post will cover the writing sample. (To read the rest of the series, visit here.) Gary sent me his writing sample […]
Sometimes it feels like nobody’s listening,” my writer friend groaned. Can you relate? Have you ever poured your heart and soul into an article or proposal only to hear the cruel sound of silence? It’s frustrating. So we just keep slogging away, right? Well, yes, but there is a way of thinking about your writing that just […]
Recently my six-year-old son won a slinky from Chuck E. Cheese. It wasn’t long before we tried to do what they do in the commercials. That’s right—we headed for the top of the stairs. We tried. And tried. At best the slinky walked down a step or two, then died. Dead slinky. “Dang,” I thought, […]
In The 4-Hour Workweek, author Timothy Ferriss encourages readers to answer this question: If you got fired from your job tomorrow, what would you do to rescue your life from financial chaos? Sometimes reflecting on a worst-case scenario opens up whole new worlds of possibility. Job Search I suspect many people would simply launch an […]
We go and we go and we go. “Watch this,” we seem to say. “I’m fast. I move. I get it done. See?” But how much of our work comes from a deep sense of calling? How much of our activity stems from our core, our creative center? How fulfilling is our work? And how […]
I’ll never forget the first time I went to Times Square. My friend and I were just out of high school. We went to New York to see as many Broadway shows as we could fit into our three-day weekend. Arriving in the evening, we checked in, threw our bags in the room, and ventured […]
I couldn’t be happier to be interviewing literary agent Esther Fedorkevich of The Fedd Agency. Esther is a first-generation American, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants born in Argentina and China — and she has that indefatigable immigrant spirit in spades. After breaking records selling Bible studies for Lifeway and then working for The Lampo Group, […]
Last fall I attended the inaugural ReWrite conference, a writers conference headed up by literary agent Esther Fedorkevich. It was one of the best writers conferences I’ve attended because of the quality of the speakers, the intimate atmosphere, and the access attendees had to great writers, editors, and agents. Author-in-his-own-right and moderator Jim Henderson interviewed […]
Whether you’re an author, speaker, employee, or blogger, Twitter is important. We know that. We’ve seen a single Tweet (from the right person) rocket an Amazon ranking. We’ve seen the retweet effect. We’ve seen large corporations like American Airlines respond dramatically to a viral tweet. But it’s a strange medium, and we don’t want to […]
