How to Write Better: Get to Know Your Deepest Animal Impulses — and Kill Your Distractions

What’s the best advice novelist Joshua Cohen has for aspiring [image error]writers? It’snot to kill your darlings but kill your distractions. Put down the smartphone, close your laptop, and turn off your TV. Besides taking your writing time from you, watching videos creates a lot of noise in your life —literal and figurative — that keeps you from hearing yourself think and talk.

What frustrates many writers, says Cohen, author of Book of Numbers, is that they look for someone else in the writing rather...