A few pointers from Tim Harford on writing non-fiction:
At the moment, having done much of my research, I’m trying to do 300 words every day as a minimum. This low target means that no matter what other commitments I have, I have no excuse not to skim through what I wrote yesterday and add [...]

Writing titles for articles that are all at once pithy, witty, informative, and memorable, is pretty difficult, to the point of bordering on the impossible, but it’s something that well known and established writers also stuggle with.
I’ve seen some jaw-droppingly awful titles, often from very gifted writers. And I’m not just talking about my [...]

14 writers offer some extensive insights into their work and the writer’s life. Here are some of the stand-out points:
Elmore Leonard:
Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you [...]

Last year US writer Deanna Zandt took the “unusual approach” of “crowdfunding”, or asking people to make contributions – or donations – so she could take some time out to write a book.
Using the wisdom of the crowd to research a book is nothing new. Clay Shirky based a whole tome around the concept. [...]

A study of New York Times article reading patterns has found readers tend to share items that are generally positive, emotional, intellectually challenging, or of a scientific nature, with their friends, a finding that somewhat refutes the notion people are mainly interested in stories of scandal or gossip.
“Science kept doing better than we expected,” [...]

People who have written a book have equated the experience with running a marathon, and, as with many long distance runners, they feel a sense of great achievement, regardless of how well their book does.
It’s sort of like running a marathon; you have to train to build up to it and maintain some discipline, but [...]

Matt Robinson compares eight fonts, including Helvetica and Cooper Black, to determine which produces the most characters per ballpoint pen.
A selection of the most commonly used typefaces were compared for how economical they are with the amount of ink which they use at the same point size. Large scale renditions of the typefaces were [...]

A tip for boosting your writing output may also be a solution for fending off writer’s block, by never allowing it to set in.
A friend who just finished writing a(n excellent) book in a short period of time says you have to ignore your brain when it tells you it’s done for the [...]

The confessions of a semi-successful author by “Jane Austen Doe”…
Never an enthusiastic employee, I quit my job at age 35 to become a full-time writer, to live life on my own terms. After publishing four books – each of them critically acclaimed, several of them award-winners, none of them big enough sellers to [...]

There are still some authors who prefer to use typewriters – rather than computers – when writing.
“I need the sound of the keys, the keys of a manual typewriter,” he told one interviewer. “The hammers striking the page. I like to see the words, the sentences, as they take shape. It’s an aesthetic [...]