“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas and only keep the good ones.” – Linus Pauling I love that quote—it applies to so many things besides ideas—but it begs the question: how can you tell which ones are the good
Read more →Whoever said “walk before you run” never spent much time with toddlers. Sure, toddlers start off trying to figure out balance and hanging on to coffee tables and couches in order to stay upright. But every last one of the ones I’ve met, once they let go
Read more →Finishing your first novel is a matter of lather, rinse, and repeat—you write a bunch of pages, pause to think and make up more, or do some suddenly-necessary research, or reassure yourself that you really did put that necessary information in some prior chapter, and then you
Read more →Once you’ve gotten started on your novel, you might think that all you have to do is repeat the process, writing a bit every day (or every Saturday morning, if that’s all the time you have), or lurching forward in huge chunks with gaps of a week
Read more →When you’re writing your first novel, there are two main things you need to remember about Chapter One: First, the opening chapter is just as important, in terms of catching the interest of readers and/or editors, as nearly every how-to-write book or website says it is. Second,
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 →“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits I’ve had several requests to talk about systems for writing fiction. The trouble is that a good, workable system is particular, even when it’s
Read more →Most of the time, people analyze story structure as a chain of actions and the consequences of those actions, leading to an eventual climax. While that’s true for a lot of writing, it ignores a critical factor that is so obvious and necessary that I, like many
Read more →It’s been a long time since I wrote a short story. I think my grand lifetime total of short stories is about twenty, of which perhaps twelve were publishable. This is because I’m a natural novelist, which is also why I don’t tend to talk about writing
Read more →After doing this for as long as I have, I’ve come to the conclusion that nearly all writers have a point in their process where their story is fragile. It’s a different point for every writer, and sometimes different stories become brittle at different points, unexpectedly. A
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