Soft re-entry

If you find yourself gritting your teeth and trying to muster up all of your self-discipline and determination in order to start doing something, it’s probably worthwhile to consider whether what you really need is to take the opposite approach. Around here, we call it soft re-entry. Imagine yourself, say, training a puppy rather than […]
More on Plan B.

Most “30-day challenges,” whether they’re for writing, diet, meditation, or whatever, focus on consistency. Your goal is to do the same thing every day for the duration or, put another way, to stick with Plan A. Theoretically, the 30 days gives you time to see the benefits of a certain behavior and build a habit […]
February Writing Challenge: what to do on Feb. 1

Are you writing? If so, that’s what you’re supposed to do today. Keep going and come back to this later! Is your day totally off the rails? If so, head straight to 5 things that count below. What you do today depends on the arc of your next several days. Over the next few days, […]
February Writing Challenge

In 2019, we launched our first February Writing Challenge, partly as a kind of joke response to 30-day challenges. On the one hand, if the 30 days in 30-day challenges is supposed to be equivalent to 1 month, why not do a 30-day challenge that’s 1 month, but make it the month of February, so […]
On blocks and blogs.

Writer’s block: the struggle is real. You might have it and blame it on something else, like depression, ADD, or any of the “ordinary” mental-health stuff that all of us seem to have at least one of—or something even more ordinary, like garden-variety distractibility or busyness. But writer’s block isn’t just for aspiring novelists or […]
Wrangling your best energy

Fact: you have more things to do than you have time to do them. Another fact: you have more things that require your best energy than you have time in your best energy zone. We’ve all been in a situation something like this: there’s an important thing you need to write, and you spend your […]
Getting to your most important writing.

This year in general, our theme is giving your scholarship some love. But today, we want to take a moment to reflect on how being gentle with yourself—giving yourself some love—makes you a better scholar, helps you to get to your scholarship better, as well as some ways you could try to cultivate that gentleness. We’re writing […]
2019 Studio Scholar Summer Session

People have been asking whether AWS offers a summer program. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what that should be—something that offers real, concrete support, for not too much money, in ways that mesh well with scholars’ particular needs in the summer. We didn’t want to create a new program if it didn’t […]
The new vacation.

A recent article in Fast Company about vacations brought back some memories from my former life. I once ran an operations department at a big bank where we did things like payroll processing for state governments. The stakes were high every day, and if something blew up, I could literally get a call from a very […]
No mud, no lotus.

Getting your scholarship done is a practice. What does your practice look like? We’ll help you find out.