Move away from the stack of books you slowly acquired ever since you first had the thought that you might want to write fiction. (Spoiler alert: all those books pretty much all say the same thing. They are as repetitive as magazines about how to swing a golf club. Or how to diet.)
Tag: Mark Stevens
Listen to Your Heart
By Mark Stevens According to one website, the first draft of Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire was 1,400 pages long. 400,000 words. He has since whacked it down by one-third, but the projected 900-page novel drew a $2 million advance. The deal was announced a few weeks ago. First novel. Hallberg had previously published…
Scrubbing the Grand Canyon Dam with a Toothbrush
By Mark Stevens Practice makes perfect. Yeah, right. I’ve been practicing this fiction thing for 30 years. Perfection? I can’t see it from here. A bit of joke, don’t you think? What is perfect when it comes to storytelling? You can put together a bunch of perfect sentences, but you don’t necessarily have a perfect…
RMFW Spotlight: Mark Stevens
The new RMFW Spotlight feature will introduce a few of our RMFW officers and volunteers. We started out with the first three members of the board of directors, sat them in the hot seat, shined the bright light on them, and channeling our best inner Oprah, plugged them with a few questions. Here’s what we…
Making the Long and Winding Road to Publication a Little Shorter with RMFW
by Mark Stevens, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers President As she accepted the Writer of the Year plaque at Colorado Gold, Linda Joffe Hull talked about living and writing for a decade in the “purgatory of almost” before finding a publisher for one of her books. As she will tell you, it was a long and…