In 2018, reeling from simultaneous breakups with a co-founder and a girlfriend, Zerfas signed up for a 10-day silent meditation retreat. “I quickly learned things could get worse,” he tells the room at Applegate with a grim laugh. After eight days of migraines, he changed techniques and stumbled into the most euphoric experience he’d had in a year.... See more

Other studies published in 2006 and 2009 showed something similar—that people who read a lot of fiction tend to be better at empathizing with others (even after the researchers had accounted for the potential bias that people with greater empathetic tendencies may prefer to read novels). And, in 2013, an influential study published in Science found... See more

In his 1905 essay “On Reading,” Marcel Proust puts it nicely: “With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’—‘Did we m... See more

So even if you don’t agree that reading fiction makes us treat others better, it is a way of treating ourselves better. Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels... See more

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Don't Edit Before You're Done with a Draft

On that note, don't waste time editing ANYTHING -- not even a misspelled word -- until you're done with a full draft.

When I finished the first draft it was about 100,000 words. The first thing I did was go back to the beginning and delete the first 30,000 of them. They were boring and unnecessary but I had... See more

If you’re totally lost on what to focus on getting better at, focus on braiding.

Narrative-style writing (fiction and nonfiction) has four major components:

1. Action: Things happening


2. Dialogue: What people are saying


3. Description: The environment around the people and events


4. Interiority: The characters internal reactions to the place and action

And you co... See more

As a first point, the Hook, we get to know Harry Potter and the story’s context. He lives with his aunt and uncle in a basement. He later discovers that he is a wizard and that his destiny is to go to Hogwarts, the school of magic. This phase is Plot Turn 1, i.e., the first turning point in the plot.

The antagonist begins to be recognized. A troll a... See more

we are simply incapable of imagining ourselves on the other side of a profound change, because the present self doing the imagining is the very self that needs to have died in order for the future self being imagined to emerge.

This is why the profoundest changes tend to happen not willed but spawned by fertile despair — the surrender at the rock bo

... See more