When to Let That Novel Go
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…
Category: Revision
Friday Feast: When No One Shows Up to Your Reading, Beach Reads, Novels of Exile and Dislocation, Five Down and Dirty Editing Tricks, and Five Stunning Writing Retreats
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…
Charles Baxter’s Captain Happen in Middle Grade and YA Fiction
Meet Captain Happen—troublemaker, narrative enabler, change agent. The novelist, essayist, and poet, Charles Baxter talks about Captain Happen as one of several ways to increase urgency and momentum in fiction. Male or female, this kind of character shakes things up….
Friday Feast: Race, Research, and High-Stakes Choices of Debut Novelists; How to Tell People What Your Book is About; Character Desire; Rewrite Caves; and 7 Steps to a Happy Revision
We kick off this week’s links with a fantastic discussion between two debut authors. I always love it when writers interview other writers because of the “me too!” moments that occur, such as the struggle to find the right POV…
The Virtual Afterlife of Words: Confessions of a 21st Century Writer
I confess. I don’t kill my darlings. I bury them alive. All those loved and discarded words. Full paragraphs and partial lines, whole pages and single, unwanted words. I gather them up, and I deposit them into a document that…
Crushed by the Crucible
So I did that thing, the very depressing one, where I pulled an old manuscript out of the files with the intention of fixing it. I was confident I knew the problem: it had to be the stakes. The reader…