Strategy and tactics aren’t synonyms, though in casual conversation they are often used as if they were. It’s understandable; they’re both about planning your actions so you can win. The difference, as I understand it, is that strategy is about planning to win the war; tactics are
Read more →When a writer starts writing a novel, he or she is essentially standing at the bottom of a mountain, looking up. That writer is facing a zillion different moving parts that have to come together to make the climb successful, and which parts are important often change
Read more →Seat-of-the-pants writers whose work quickly sets up like concrete face some unique problems with revising.
Read more →Becoming a professional fiction writer is a lot of work. A lot.
Read more →The Internal Critic, aka Internal Editor, is the part of your brain that points out every single thing that is wrong with whatever you are doing (whether that’s writing or making a fancy dinner for your in-laws), brings up the obvious impossibility of whatever giant task you
Read more →The idea that a plot is a series of events related by cause and effect goes back at least to E.M. Forster, who said, in Aspects of the Novel, that “The king died and then the queen died” was not a plot, merely a set of sequential
Read more →Technology changes the way we work. Everybody knows this, but there is nothing quite like having your Internet go out to bring it home to you. Last week’s infrastructure failure made me think about how my writing process has changed over time. I started my first book
Read more →“Aiming for perfection is what causes people to stay stuck.” –Alice Boyes My brother recently took a class in gem-cutting. When he finished, he told me that a “perfect” cut is a matter of magnification. What looks perfect to the naked eye is a bit off when
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
Read more →Everyone I know wants to do good work. Very few will admit to wanting their work to be perfect, either because they’ve had “nothing’s perfect” drummed into them, because they don’t want to appear to be saying that they are so good they can write perfect fiction
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