Once you’ve committed to the seed-crystal idea you’re going to turn into your first novel, you’ll have to develop it. (The commitment part is important. There will be some point—possibly more than one—in this process where everything you’ve written sounds stupid, clichéd, or just too frustrating to
Read more →Welcome to 2025! Lots of people do New Year’s resolutions, or come up with annual goals, or set intentions, or do some similar type of life planning at this point in the year. And apparently “write a novel” is on a lot of those lists of goals.
Read more →Happy holidays to everybody. Christmas and Hanuka’s first night both fall on a Wednesday this year, so I felt a more specific wish was appropriate. In the same spirit, I offer a link to one of my favorite poems of all time, John M. Ford’s Winter Solstice,
Read more →Even in a novel that has a prologue, the writer will, at some point, need to get more context into the story somehow. (Most novels don’t need a prologue–see last week’s post–and those that do, don’t need the twenty-plus pages that would give the reader everything they might
Read more →Context is important. It’s not the only thing that is important in a story, though, and sometimes it isn’t as important as writers think it is. Getting the context into the story is a perennial writing difficulty. There are two main solutions: working the context into the
Read more →The holiday season is now officially in full swing. Around here, it starts slowly, a bit before Halloween, then ramps up gradually until just before Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving week is a steep climb full of preparations for either going somewhere to celebrate or hosting a celebration, and after
Read more →This regular Open Mic post coincides with the Thanksgiving holiday week in the U.S., which is convenient! Good wishes and happy holidays for everybody, and happy turkey week for everyone in the U.S.
Read more →A long time ago, I attended a workshop in which the presenter asked us to write a one-page description of our ideal day. I couldn’t do it. I don’t have one “ideal” day that I’d be happy to repeat over and over—no matter how good a day
Read more →A few years ago, I was talking to a businessperson at a family gathering, and I made a comment about my then-current work in process. He immediately assumed that my “project” (writing a book) would be “done” once the book was published and on the shelves for
Read more →One of the most difficult things I have to do, as a novelist, is to come up with a short version of the book. This is, in large part, because I am a novelist—I have a hard time saying anything in less than 80,000 words—but that’s not
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