The last thing I do before closing my eyes to sleep is to mentally prepare myself for the fight tomorrow. How easy it is, congratulating yourself after a productive today, to talk yourself into slacking off tomorrow. The first post in this series was titled RESISTANCE WAKES UP WITH ME. It does, and I know it. Resistance will hit me tomorrow morning before I even open my eyes. It will try to turn my success today into failure tomorrow. Resistance will try to convince me I can relax, ease up. “You put a good day in the bank today. Enjoy…

I’m not joking when I say I do some of my best work in bed. In the middle of the night. Something about that twilight stage of consciousness when we’re not awake but not asleep either. Why do ideas come to us in the shower, or where we’re shaving or driving on the freeway and hanging onto a strap in the subway? Those too are twilight states. They are “gateway stages” when the membrane is down and insights can bubble up from the Muse’s secret sanctuary. The ego, I believe, is the generator of Resistance. So when the ego is…

Writers sometimes ask me, “What should I do between books?” My answer: There should never be a “between books.” Don’t stop. Don’t blow your momentum. Myself, I want to be ninety pages into the next book before I finish the one I’m working on now. My aim is to move seamlessly from one to the other. If I knock off Book #13 on Tuesday, I’m deep into the trenches on #14 Wednesday. Why? Resistance. Resistance loves it when we stop working. I have a friend at the gym who used to hang out with Jack Lalanne. He said Jack had…

My mantra when I finally sit down to work is Hit the page running. What I mean by that is to plunge in immediately. First minute. First second. First millisecond. Why do I do this? Resistance. I don’t want to give Resistance the slightest opening to worm its way into my brain and start me “thinking.” No dawdling. No cogitating. No mulling over. Start. Get to work. Get into the flow. If I’m working on Draft #1 of a new project, I will pick up immediately where I left off yesterday. Without “thinking,” I’ll continue telling the story. If I…

About eighteen months ago I wrote a series for this blog titled “Report From the Trenches.” The posts were about a particularly ugly run of months when I was struggling with a book-in-progress that had crashed at the finish line. The struggle was about starting over. It was about not caving in to the massive Resistance that arises when you, the writer, have to go back to Square One and rethink everything. That book was published yesterday. Like just about everybody who reads this blog, I have a really hard time flogging my own stuff. So all I’ll say is the…

When I was eight years old, my family spent part of a summer vacation visiting friends in New England. One of the grownups we spent time with was a painter. He had a big sunny studio out behind his house, just past trellises groaning under the weight of roses and through a little wattle-type gate. I remember the artist’s wife telling me and my brother, “Don’t ever go in there without Peter’s permission.” Of course Peter gave his permission all the time. He was happy to have kids around. Sometimes we would even take naps in the studio. One thing…

I’m a gym person. I have been for thirty years. I go early. Ridiculously early. Twyla Tharp does too. Here she is from The Creative Habit: I begin each day of my life with a ritual. I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and the weight training I…

It seems so harmless, doesn’t it? A simple sheet of 8 1/2-by-11 bond that you and I roll into our typewriter (or the equivalent empty screen on our laptop.) What could possibly go wrong? (Other than terminal procrastination, paralysis by perfectionism, self-doubt, self-loathing, self-recrimination, self-hatred, not to mention terminal existential dread, panic, hysteria, flatulence, bad breath, dandruff, and the uncontrollable desire to drink, smoke, vape, fly to Katmandu, and have a mad self-destructive affair with the first person that says hello.)   The blank page is not neutral.   If we think of it in combat terms, that empty sheet…