Leitmotifs For My Characters
Feeling a bit of cabin fever? Try coming up with a theme song for each major character in your novel. Fellow incubee Anjali Mathur gave me this idea last spring when she said she put on certain songs when she…
Category: The Writing Life
I Am Not a Success Story
There’s not a lot of advice I can give to other writers about how to be successful. The problem is that there are too many individual interpretations of “success.” To me, success looks like this: I can pay my electric…
Using Your Killer Head Cold For Character Insight
Last weekend, I was moping around my kitchen. The whole house seemed dreary and disorganized, with unopened mail on the table and dishes in the sink. But even though I knew they were things that needed to be done, my arms…
Friday Feast: #%@& Snow Edition
Y’all know we’re in Boston, right? As my fellow site editor, Emily Ross, said: SNOWMYGOD. Apologies, almost every single link this @#$^& week is going to include some cussing and grumbling and is NSFW. We gotta get it out of…
Stuck: How to Deal with Writer’s Block
I hated to even utter the word. I would not say it aloud. I couldn’t even write it down. I thought it, briefly, but in my one successful meditation moment, I let the word go. It would not overtake me….
The Book That Was My Doorstop Has Become A Sacred Text
It’s true. For years I used it to keep the wind from slamming shut a particularly annoying door. Why this book? Because it was there: the first in a use-every-last-inch row of dusty volumes precariously atilt atop a chock-full bookcase,…