Have you ever found that when you’re writing on a particular topic how easy it is to get distracted by the information and research that’s available?

If you were wondering where I and my posts have been for the last few days, I think I’m currently going through (and slowly coming out of) what Seth Godin calls The Dip. It’s that time in all great plans, when …

I was writing up the Writing Tips for the Bodhi Tree newsletter today and it got me thinking on the old question of how many words do we know and how many do we actually use.

n every day life almost all of what we know and assume is absorbed through what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell. The challenge though is that we all have a primary sense, a few that are average and one sense that definitely lags behind.

Since you are here on this blog, I’m going to make the assumption that you enjoy writing. For the sake of this post I’m also going to assume that you don’t write full-time for a living (however, if you do I would still be interested in your view on this topic).

The more time I spend with writers the more I realise that the majority of us are the ‘do homework for the Monday class on Sunday evening’ kind. Why is that?

As a Writing Coach, I see on a daily basis the importance of having a writing ritual, especially for those people who need to write daily. It’s as if sometimes our brains need that little trigger to put us into our ‘writing zone’.

When a competition is announced it can be tempting for writers, especially new ones, to simply flick through their supply of stories and select one that seems to fit the requirements. Then, with little more than a cursory re-read, they put it in an envelope and send it off.

It occurred to me yesterday that since I’m holding the 2011 ‘First Line’ short story writing competition, with it’s deadline in June, now might be a great time to cover some writing tips relevant to entering competitions.

There’s no doubt that entering writing competitions is a valid goal for writers; they can provide deadlines, credibility, experience, focus and so much more. But what makes a writer enter one competition and not another?