Would-be writers often go looking for help. Most turn to free online advice and/or groups like the NaNoWriMo community, look for people who will beta-read their work, or hunt up other writers to form a critique group (this last has gotten a lot easier with the rise
Read more →“Plot-noodling” is a term I came up with to describe a … thing … that I and some of my writer friends do when one of us is stuck; it involves the writer sitting down with one or (rarely) two other people, who ask the writer a
Read more →Stress affects everybody’s writing, one way or another, sooner or later, because stress is part of life. How stress affects people’s writing varies from writer to writers. For some folks, writing is an escape, so the more stressed they are, the more they write (though this isn’t
Read more →A while back, I had a frustrating conversation with a guy who claimed to want to write. I’d hoped for better, given his email (which was why I agreed to meet him in the first place), but…well. So here are some of the things he did right, and a
Read more →One of the persistent pieces of advice given to new and would-be writers is “Don’t talk about your work until it’s finished!” Some folks get incredibly passionate about it, running on for pages in their how-to-write manuals and blogs, or shouting and waving their arms if they’re
Read more →One of the many things nobody warned me about when I was getting started was all the self-proclaimed “experts” who would show up and start giving me advice about my writing career, whether I wanted it from them or not. By and large, these are not people
Read more →When you look at the arts, there are some that clearly, obviously require the talents of multiple people to produce. Movies, for instance, need not only writers but actors, camera operators, prop and costume people, and on and on – last time I went to one, the
Read more →One of the things that happens when you write books that are marketed as Young Adult or childrens is, you get letters from kids who have been assigned to write them in class. It’s really obvious, for two reasons: first, the number of letters drops off markedly
Read more →Sooner or later, everyone gets stressed, and stress affects everybody’s writing, one way or another. There are a few folks whose writing is their escape from stress, who write more when they get more stressed and less when they get happy, but that doesn’t seem to be
Read more →I think I was back in high school when I first started setting goals for myself on a regular basis. I didn’t start saving copies of them until I was out of college, though, and I rather regret that. At this point in my life, looking back
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