This was on the board when I went to teach my Intro to Nonfiction class on Tuesday. It's a six week class with the Gotham Writers Workshop that aims to get people who may want to start writing but don't know how. It starts again in the fall.

Most of the time people's creativity has been sapped by either academia or corporate life. The class is a sort of a boot camp to get people thinking again.

I've been teaching the class for five years and 90% of the time people have been failing as writers because:

1. They don't read enough. I'm shocked by how many people don't read news or even something like The New Yorker or New York magazine on a regular basis.

2. They claim they don't have time to concentrate, yet they've seen every episode of Lost or The Bachelor. Time management isn't terribly difficult. And it's much more gratifying to create something than to consume it.

3. They think they have to write every day, which is hooey and a slight waste of time. Writing blindly every day is akin to getting on an elliptical and pumping away aimlessly. It'll keep you busy for half an hour, but you may not get much out of it.

4. This has more to do with fiction writing than short, non fiction pieces: Novels are written via outline, not by sitting at the laptop and waiting for the muse to strike. It's trite to say, but breaking down large projects into smaller pieces actually gets the job done. Also: no literary agent will even talk to you unless you have a completed outline of your project. No agent = no book deal.