Making Amends for Getting it Wrong
I’m going to be honest: I’m a little afraid right now. As I approach this third rail, know that I do so from a position of humility. This is one ignoramus’s developing story of how I’m learning not to be…
Category: Rewriting
Review: Understanding Show, Don’t Tell
As often as Show, Don’t Tell is drummed into us, it’s not always clear how to do it. Telling is sometimes necessary, even desirable in a sprawling novel, and the impulse to perform corrective showing can lead to page-count creep…
Writing, Fast and Slow
It wasn’t until I joined in National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) a few years ago that I finished a full draft of a novel for the first time. For anyone unfamiliar with Nanowrimo, it’s a national challenge to write a 50,000…
YA Wednesday: Write A Successful 1st Draft (Without Stabbing Yourself In The Eye With a Spork), The Greatest Lesson I Learned in Writing This Year, Tropes to Avoid, Diverse Books to Look Forward to in 2017
The New Years resolution at the top of my list is to finish The Black Sea, my novel in progress. And not just to finish it but to wrap it up in two to three months. Admittedly some of my…
Hello, First Draft, My Old Friend
So, First Draft, we meet again. I just finished your brother a few weeks ago and stuck him in a (virtual) drawer. Don’t worry. You’re definitely meeting the same fate. Oh, stop screaming. Doesn’t the certainty of what’s going to…
In the Final Hours
I had written twenty, maybe thirty, pages of my first draft when I had the idea of setting the climax at a theme party. I thought it would be fun to put my characters into costumes and get them in…