Take Your Time
It wasn’t so long ago that I was a person who kept her calendar in stone. I did not flake, bail, ghost, disappear, get busy, or “forget.” If I said I was going, I went. Period. End of story. I was that…
Category: Writing Advice
How Real Crimes Influenced My Fiction
This post first appeared on Jungle Red Writers in September 2015. I’m from a small town. East Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Population: almost 11,000 when I last lived there. That was 1993, the year I graduated high school. A half-year earlier Kent…
Without Geography You’re Nowhere: Why Setting Matters
We are awash in narrative. It arrives on every platform in ever-shorter form. (A Little Life not withstanding.) Which has me wondering, who has the time to dwell in a Brontë moor? And what’s the pay off? Setting: A History…
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…
Letting Go to Write More
I did a tough thing a few weeks ago. I hired a dog walker for Zoe and Zephyr, my two whippets. It hadn’t been something I was planning on doing. We were tight, the Zs and I. We spent our…
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…