I blame Julie Andrews. In The Sound of Music, she sings, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” She makes it sound so easy, doesn’t she? Turns out, good beginnings are a lot harder to write than she led me to believe. I’m never taking writing advice from a singing…
In any given situation, each individual involved in that situation will perceive the exact same things happening in different—sometimes shockingly different—ways. That’s why crime scene witness testimony is often contradictory. The same concept should be true in every scene we write in our stories. No two characters will experience the events within a scene in…
Well, drat. You just received a(nother) rejection letter from an agent or editor. You can spend the next 48 hours sulking, watching Netflix, doom-scrolling, or threatening to move to Belize and take up watermelon farming. Or… you could try one of these methods of dealing with rejection instead: [Photo by Thomas Park https://unsplash.com/@thomascpark on Unsplash]
What do you need to take your writing to the next level? Do you wish you were stronger in some aspect of your writing skills? Or maybe the business side of your writing career could use some bolstering. Perhaps it’s your workspace or your writing schedule (or lack of) that’s impeding your progress. If it’s…
April is National Poetry Month. So why should that matter to fiction writers? Because poetry is the marriage of words and ideas, blending the two together to create something greater than the sum of their parts—which is exactly the same thing fiction does. Personally, I believe reading poetry (and, if you choose, writing the occasional…