December is a minefield of writing distractions—parties, presents, way too much egg nog, and not nearly enough silent nights. Fortunately, January is the antidote. The indulgent holiday spirit is replaced with a refreshed sense of discipline, ambition, and self-improvement. What’s that you say? You didn’t start…
I don’t know much about meditating but have been aspiring to do so for years ever since I read Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. Over the years, I’ve tried. I went to countless classes, got an iPhone app, looked…
The January freeze is on here in New England. Perfect excuse to stay inside and get those fingers dancing across the keyboard with new stories or with revisions of the old ones. This week: writing prompts from song lyrics, how to…
I had a teacher once at Stonehill College in southeastern Mass, and he was a pretty good teacher. It was a long time ago. Mr. Lawrence (pseudonym) taught me to love Conrad. He showed me how to read Joyce’s “The…
Jonathan Lethem once said in an interview that he wrote early drafts of Motherless Brooklyn, a first-person novel from the POV of a character with Tourette’s, in third person. The interviewee was shocked. And in disbelief. But Lethem insisted he…
At the end of 2013, I asked Dead Darlings contributors and Novel Incubator alums to share the best thing they did for themselves in the previous year. In 2014, two contributors published their debut novels, two contributors sold their novels,…