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…
Category: Revision
Everyday Expressions of Emotion & Other Wearisome, Well-Worn Words
I’m at that point with my manuscript: banging my head against the wall as I flag and purge repetitive words and replace all those well-worn expressions: he smiles, she grins, he laughs, they frown, she shrugs, he furrows his brow,…
Confessions of a Story Slam Winner
I am sitting in the audience waiting to see if Steve Almond will call my name. After years of listening to the Moth Radio Hour and going to Story Slams, I have finally gotten up the nerve to put my…
Making it Work: 4 Tips for Squeezing Writing between Job, Kids, Life
Some weeks before my artist friend Vicki Paret’s baby arrived, she stretched nine canvases of equal size. She gridded nine rectangles on each canvas. Eighty-one rectangles would form one epic painting. She worked methodically, left to right, top to bottom….
Point of View: Omniscient
“Partway through writing my first novel, I had a terrifying realization: I needed an omniscient narrator.” -Celeste Ng, Dead Darlings post April 7, 2014. Writing a novel is all about making a series of decisions that add up to a…
Cliché as landmine: Use the unoriginal to inspire better edits
Editing your novel manuscript can be a painful, embarrassing process. For me, one of the many humbling things I find in a stack of freshly drafted pages is how often I’ve been entirely unoriginal. During the first pass of anything,…