Quite a few well-known writers have had strange, exciting, or adventurous lives. Ernest Hemingway was an ambulance driver during WWI, after which he did things like bull running in Spain and safaris in Africa; Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) was a gold prospector, worked on the steamboats
Read more →Ursula le Guin was and is one of my favorite writers, and when she published a book on writing some twenty years ago, I grabbed it at once. I wasn’t disappointed. Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous
Read more →Over the last couple of decades, I’ve noticed that more and more of the newer writers are over-describing things. It looks to me as if they are attempting to create a clear and specific image in words, the way a camera does with, well, a photo. At
Read more →Creating a novel – or anything, really – is like taking a trip around the world; no matter how much preparation you’ve done or how carefully you’ve planned things, the places you visit will be strange and surprising. Things will happen that you didn’t anticipate – some
Read more →There’s a phrase I use a lot when I’m talking to people who want to be writers: “If what you are doing isn’t working, try something else!” Recently it has been borne in on me that a lot of those folks have nodded enthusiastically… and then they
Read more →This morning, I woke up to a good 3” or more of wet snow in my driveway. I shrugged and gave myself an extra ten minutes to get to they gym for my workout. I didn’t bother to shovel; I just backed out onto the street (which
Read more →Most people I know think of career paths as a series of jobs that ideally involve increasing levels of skills, responsibilities, pay, and status – something that’s applicable chiefly in terms of climbing the corporate ladder. But entrepreneurs and freelancers have career paths, too; they’re just a
Read more →Working with plots is a balancing act. And it’s not a teeter-totter balance, where one side goes up when the other goes down and you just have to get the weight exactly right on both ends to make it level and steady. No, plots have to balance
Read more →In the last two posts, I’ve talked about six of the reasons writers get stuck. These are the last couple I can currently think of: External factors. Sometimes, these are relatively minor things, like an addiction to a TV series or a deep desire to spend the
Read more →Last week, I talked about the three most common reasons for a writer getting stuck: first, that it’s actually part of their normal process, second, the fear of some stretchy or tricky bit that comes next, and third, that they’ve actually made a mistake and their backbrain
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