At the beginning of this year I started up on a new revision of a book I’d been working on for two years. And for two years I’d been swimming inside the world of the story, intimate with its characters,…
Fail Faster, Succeed Quicker The first time I saw “Fail faster, succeed quicker,” I was at an MIT robotics convention. Don’t ask. The idea being each failure teaches one to design a better experiment–or novel. More failures means more learning…
By Guest Contributor Virginia Pye We all know writers with unpublished manuscripts hidden in desk drawers. Successful authors often admit to a half dozen failed, boxed-away books. Emily Dickinson bundled her poems with string and placed them under her bed….
“I just want to understand what the character is feeling.” If you’re playing writing workshop bingo, this statement should be the center square, guaranteed to come up in every class when discussing a work’s emotional apex. Sometimes off-base, yes, but…
I recently returned from my annual writing retreat with my fabulous writing group, the Salt + Radish Writers. We go every year and spend four days in a rambling, old Maine house on the beach. We have a schedule, stick…
If you read nothing else in today’s links*, I hope you read Matthew Norman’s account of a reading at Barnes & Noble where no one showed up. Or at least he thought that no one had showed up to his reading until…