The Sound of One Hand Clapping
I am not a Buddhist (although I have researched Buddhism in the service of one of my novels), but I’ve spent time pondering in relation to my writing a variant of the famous Buddhist kōan*: You can hear the sound…
Category: Writing Advice
Fact or Fiction in Historical Fiction
“Writing a novel is to fabricate an elaborate lie. The end game is not to recreate reality.” -Craig Larsen in On Historical Fiction, True Stories, and not Recreating Reality on LitHub, October 7, 2016 I grew up in a small…
In Pursuit of the Perfect Logline
LOGLINE: A novelist must distill her story into a one-sentence logline, or she will fail to sell her book and will end up alone in a padded room. Anyone pitching a book can relate to the angst of writing a…
Everything I’ve Learned about Writing I’ve Learned from Soap Operas
Go Figure: Musings from the Mind of Rob Wilstein Like Sands Through the Hourglass, So are the Days of our Lives. So true. So true. And so insightful. When you think about those grains of sand, dropping, one by one,…
Interview with Lisa Borders, Novel Teacher Extraordinaire
If you’ve taken a novel-related class at Boston’s Grub Street, it’s likely you’ve crossed paths with Lisa Borders. Author of The Fifty-First State and Cloud Cuckoo Land, Lisa developed Grub Street’s Novel in Progress classes, founded the Novel Generator, and…
Asking For Blurbs
There are many things I love about writing: creating stories, building worlds, meeting other writers, and talking about craft. There are some things I don’t love: the pay, the moments where I cannot solve a problem I created, and writing…