My course is called Hate Writing Less.
It will increase your creative freedom.
Lots of people have trouble writing. They really want to do it, but they put it off endlessly, or are never satisfied by their attempts.
They assume that this is a problem of writing skill: they just need to learn to
do it better.
In my experience, as a writer and coach, this is not true.
Most writing issues are psychological in nature. The problem isn't your skill, it's that you hate writing.
Don't get me wrong, skills help. But you'll naturally upskill if you're enjoying the process. If you're not, no amount of technique will help you.
For this reason, I made this course. It contains the insights, process tricks, and mindset shifts that turned me into a happily published author and award-winning magazine writer after years (
years) of struggling to put pen to paper.
You can watch two videos from the course to get a taste of it before you buy:
the introduction, and one of my favorite lessons,
the anti-grinding principle.
It costs $275, or $175 if you have a low income.
Testimonials
"Sasha's course is killer. It’s ridiculously enjoyable AND dense with insight I've never seen/can't get elsewhere. I didn’t even think it was possible—but it’s shifted how I approach writing. It got me to drop the misery and unlock potential I couldn’t access before. It bleeping works."
–
Kristin Posehn
“This is a masterclass in discovering and unsticking the various blocks and neuroses that keep creativity from flowing. It’s part nuts-and-bolts instruction, part therapy, part spiritual transmission. Better than writing advice, it feels like advice about how to be the kind of person from whom writing effortlessly flows. And it works.”
–
Jake Orthwein
"Hate Writing Less, although ostensibly about writing, is actually about navigating and enjoying all the emotional stuff that comes up when you actually sit down to write. This is far more important and valuable than any tactics about writing—although there are plenty of those in there, too—and is largely what's missing from all the other writing courses out there. So if you're someone who writes and who has emotions, you should totally buy it."
–Michael Ashcroft
"As a creative writer, everything Sasha writes is very clearly him. Similarly, his writing course is one that only he could’ve made. And getting access to his often counterintuitive thoughts on writing is worth every penny."
–
Lyle McKeany
My story
For seven years or so, all I wanted to do was write. But I just couldn’t set pen to paper consistently. I got in front of the keyboard every day, screamed internally, and smoked a bunch of cigarettes. And when I did produce a few attempts at writing, my work never satisfied me. I was locked in an antagonistic relationship with creation: it was the most important part of my life, and the worst.
In this way, I wasted years of potentially productive time. And getting out of it wasn’t actually that hard. It wasn’t a matter of working more, it was a matter of changing my relationship to the work.
After I changed my mindset, within a few years, I got a book deal with a major publisher, won a couple of magazine awards, and, more importantly, began to fully enjoy creativity.
In the course of this work, I discovered some powerful mental tools that seem to reliably unblock people. This course is my attempt to distill those tools into an efficiently packaged industrial strength unfuck-your-writing transmission, with exercises that could transform your relationship with the page.
If you watch these videos, and do these assignments, I have faith that you will produce more writing, and have more fun doing it.
30-day money-back guarantee
Creativity is complicated. There is nothing that works for absolutely everyone. Although I have faith in the contents of this course, I know that there’s a possibility that it's not what you need.
If you fully engaged with the course, including the assignments, and it didn’t do anything for you, then I’m not interested in keeping your money. Just shoot me an email within a month explaining why it wasn’t helpful, and I’ll refund you. (I might even have some suggestions for what would be helpful.)
This is not a course about how to be a carbon copy of me, or how to succeed in the Creator Economy, or how to write more effective sales copy. (Although, if you want to do any of those things, a freer relationship with writing will help.)
I am not interested in trying to tell you what you should write, and I’m not going to offer you a formula for success.
I am agnostic about prose style. I’m not here to tell you to write short sentences, or long sentences. What I’m interested in is allowing you to be more yourself in your writing, whether that person is succinct and straightforward, or eccentric and long-winded.
I am not here to propose a system that I think is right for everyone, or a set of habits that I think everyone should adopt. Because I don’t believe in those things.
I just believe in working with your anxieties, fully embracing who you are, and transmuting that internal wrangling into words.
The course contents
The course is organized into the following sections:
–The opening remarks section, which sets the table with some premises about what healthier artistic creation looks like
–The idea section, which talks about how to find inspiration from anywhere, and take a more playful approach to selecting topics
–The generation section, which talks about how to become a furious typing machine, an athlete of the hand muscles
–The mindset section, which talks about how to engineer your understanding of who you are as a creator, in order to empower yourself and minimize suffering
–The editing section, which is about how to win the lottery by psychic intuition
–The common fears section, which is about how to navigate the neuroses I see in the wild
–The work and non-work section, which is about habits and goal-setting
–The growth section, which is about how to improve as a writer without getting in your way again
–The concluding remarks section, which is about your trajectory, and how you can incorporate the lessons of the course.
There are some helpful exercises along the way, including one series of progressive assignments, a sort of mini-project that ties all the lessons together.
I think this is the only writing course where one of the assignments is “don’t work.”
There’s about three hours of content, between the video and texts. I could’ve stretched it out more, but I wanted to make this thing compact and effective. I’m always confused when I see courses that advertise the number of hours they are—shouldn’t the point be the result you get, rather than the hours you spend watching it?
Questions frequently asked by me
Will there be future versions of the course?
I will add videos to it over time, when I think of things I think are potentially important to add. As well, the course contains an invitation to ask me about writing fears you have, and, if your particular fear seems like it could be a broad phenomenon, I might make a video about it.
Is this Morning Pages?
No. I believe that journaling can be powerful. But I think there has to be a bridge between personal uncensored talking-to-yourself free-writing, and writing you share with an audience. Part of what I’m doing here is helping you build that bridge.
Where does your teaching philosophy come from?
It’s a mix. First and foremost, what I advocate is what’s been true in my experience. I escaped artistic misery, and I’ve helped other people do it. After trying lots of techniques and mindsets, I compiled what seems to work.
But there are tons of influences on my work outside of writing.
A short, incomplete list of influences includes:
—
Impro—
This Alexander Technique course
—Gifted coaches like
Joe Hudson and
Chris Sparks—The
philosophy of David Chapman
—
This video of the guy from LCD Soundsystem
Anything else?
I think that covers the basic info.
If you’ve come this far, and you still have questions, feel free to shoot me an email at sasha dot chapin at gmail dot com.
Sometimes, when I don’t know what else to do, I look at the stunning and enigmatic photography of Saul Leiter:
