One of the ways writers attempt to make themselves produce more words fast is to give themselves quotas and/or deadlines. “I will write 1,000 words/four pages/for three hours every day/week/month.” Most of the time, this doesn’t work terribly well for me, for several reasons. The most obvious
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 →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 →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 →Last week, I kept stumbling across stories about the different responses people have to feedback. The first couple came in the form of two versions of the old story about the violin maestro. He was approached by a young student who wanted the maestro’s judgement on his
Read more →The other day, one of my dear friends and I had one of those long, rambling, writerly conversations about our current works-in-progress, our process, and the horrors of the literary life. At this particular moment in time, we are at opposite points on the first two, which
Read more →One of the persistent questions writers get is “Where do you find the time?” This ignores two basic things: first, nobody finds or saves time, really. We all have 24 hours a day, which arrives one nanosecond at a time at the same pace (though how we
Read more →There’s a joke I heard once, about a man who prayed fervently for forty years that God would let him win the lottery. Finally one night as he was offering his prayer once again, a voice came out of the air above him and said, “Look, I
Read more →New year, new year’s resolutions. There are recommendations all over the web about how to make resolutions, which ones to make, and how to keep them for longer than a week. Googling “new year’s resolutions for fiction writers” got me four million hits. So I took a
Read more →Everybody is good at something. Nobody is good at everything. At least 98% of the writers I know, faced with those two sentences, nod sort of absently at the first one and immediately start working out exactly how the second one applies to them – that is,
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