Unpenned: Turning the Novel Loose
“There comes a time when you have to let the novel go.” “It will never be perfect.” “You can’t fiddle with it forever.” Yadda, yadda. So goes the writing advice about when to finally set a novel free in the…
Category: Revision
The Importance of Hating Your Own Writing
Every revision has its own character. There’s the first messy revision, during which you try to cull from the confusing mass of pages some sort of a narrative. The second brings with it massive structural changes (in my case, cutting…
Shaking the Slump, or Contingencies for the Failure of Bloody Mindedness
“Writer’s Block” is a lot like climate change: despite mounting evidence that it does, in fact, exist, some of us are still deep in denial. Until recently, I believed that provided a writer shows up to the desk every day,…
Friday Feast: Vomit Drafts, F Words, Introvert Laments, Lessons Before Writing, and World History Plot Holes
There’s nothing like a first draft — whether it’s your 1st first draft or your 10th — to make you feel like an amateur, or a diner at a restaurant that consistently receives one-star reviews on Yelp. It’s easy to…
Finding the Right Title
It’s almost a rite of passage to have to change the title of your book when it sells to a publisher, and I fully expected that to happen to me. I figured it would be just one more step in…
Let Sleeping Masterpieces Lie
Originally written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman was the novel Harper Lee first submitted to her publishers before To Kill a Mockingbird. Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014. Figures from online retailer…