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Hello, and welcome to this week’s WEN-zine nuggets.

Could it be that the groundhog was right? It’s for sure warmer earlier than usual here in the North Country. Warm-ish can happen for a day or two at any time during the winter; but professional weather prognosticators are saying it may be ongoing. If you like your maple syrup “real,” hope for colder nights. For the sugar to flow, the night temps need to go below freezing during March, but a local producer says warmer than usual days “should” be OK. But maybe no sugar-on-snow this year. Wonder if we’ll have apples this fall to trigger our writing ...

1. Scent as a writing trigger

Friedrich Schiller, the German poet, playwright and all round creative polymath, kept a drawer full of rotting apples in his studio. Their decaying smell, so he claimed, was necessary to feel the urge to write.

While many things can trigger a writing routine, our sense of smell is often neglected. It is considered a buried sense as it bypasses the processing parts of our brain to connect directly to emotional memory.

Dr. Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist and expert on the psychological science of smell, says we can engineer associations with scent that create “specific mindful, positive mood states.”

Herz says the key to creating a scent association is for it to be a specific smell, not something you encounter a lot. It's the weirdness and specificity of Schiller's apples that makes it so effective.

Bec Evans and Chris Smith, who wrote “The Scent of Writing” in their Breakthroughs & Blocks newsletter, add that “smells can be rewards at the end of a writing session when you get to take the lid off the biscuit tin or uncork a bottle of wine! This positive association embeds a sense of satisfaction for having done the work that will make it more likely you return to your writing.”

2. Smarter book reading

Bestselling author Scott Young says a single habit has improved the quality of his book reading more than anything else: reading rebuttals.

One point he makes, “Most books you read don’t present a singular thesis; rather, they present an enormous collection of ideas and their implications. When you read rebuttals, they invariably zoom in on a few weak points in the author’s argument.”

His post, published yesterday, describes several ways to find useful and reliable rebuttals, from Google Scholar to ChatGPT or other LLMs. But doesn’t this take a lot of time? “Not really,” he says ...

“Most books are a few hundred pages. A book review can be as little as a couple of pages. Even reading a few reviews for a given book shouldn’t add more than 10% to your overall reading time.”

Bottom line, he says, “Accepting that most arguments are imperfect, that even true ideas have persuasive rebuttals, is an essential step to becoming a better thinker.”

And wouldn’t being a better thinker be transformative ... leading to one being a better writer?

3. Heads up: March issue of Freelance Writer’s Report (FWR) ...

will be posted in the WEN Center early Friday morning.

Not a current member? Join or renew and save with coupons below.

4. FYI items

▪ The Best Notebooks for Fountain Pens ... if you use a fountain pen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xG6cFW0g-E

▪ How to Overcome Procrastination: Overcoming Perfectionism and Anxiety to Break the Deadline Dilemma by Aria Ponder. Kindle edition free today

Enjoy!

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To Your Writing Success,

Dana K Cassell

Editor

(Dana Cassell is founder of Writers-Editors Network, and has been freelancing/creating full-time for 47 years. In addition to writing, editing, and fact-checking for numerous business clients, she has published more than 2,000 articles and has ghosted or authored more than a dozen books.)

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