Bart Westgeest

There are many programs for writing and editing texts and most are good for anybody and anything. Because basically they all do one thing – they let you create texts. As a writer you write, as an editor you edit and as a publisher you publish. The writer in you wants a tool that can create [...]

I think, honestly, that of all the things I wrote in the past, like diaries, short stories and poems, I only feel satisfied with about a handful of writings. At the moment that would be perhaps 3 poems and 3 short stories. The older works are not necessarily that bad, but I don’t want them any [...]

This thought was somewhere in between my notes. It is from not too long ago, but I actually can’t remember where I got the inspiration from. It must have been a blogpost somewhere. Life has to be a selvfølge (something obvious, literally: following its self), one does things because one has to. Because it is needed [...]

This post from 43folders.com contains a video with another interesting line of thoughts by Merlin Mann, who thinks about productivity, creativity and the caveats surrounding them. Merlin presents his ideas in a popular way, fast and often funny, but he is serious and dedicated in trying to find out the truth about his subjects. It is another [...]

As you can see from this screenshot from today’s notes I have trouble on concentrating me on one language. When I read Dutch I spontaneously write in Dutch, and the same goes for English and Danish. I don’t really know what to do with this right now, it is not always practical but it happens. To write a [...]

Thomas Nydahl quotes regularly on his blog Occident from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Three days ago the quote was about monotony, stating that an existence should be monotonous in order not to be monotonous. When life is lived the same way every day, then every little thing becomes important, and every little change [...]

I can have trouble taking myself serious when I paint or write, even to an extent that it often makes me stop doing what I want to do. I mirror my own thoughts onto others and think that many people have no idea that something like painting is actually working, it requires a lot of [...]

After reading a post by Merlin Mann on the process of starting a project (and to keep going) and after listening to Elizabeth Gilbert in a TED-talk mentioned in the post about nursing your creativity, I understand that they offer a way to deal with one of the major obstacles for writers.. We all know it [...]

NaNoWriMo ‘08 was a mixed pleasure for me. I had chosen a not complicated storyline with many autobiographical elements and after plotting it all into yWriter I felt pretty comfortable. In the beginning the writing progressed well but I quickly noticed that this writing 1667 words a day – no matter what quality – [...]

This year I decided to join the group of about 100.000 people that each one of them will try to write a 50.000 words novel in the month of November.  Everything is allowed as long as it is fiction-novel and every one of the 50.000 words is written in this one month.  In order [...]