Writer 911: What’s Your Emergency?
This past week I’ve heard from a lot of writer friends who are having a tough time, mostly with their writing. As one friend put it, “hard to write with all this treason.” It got me to imagining a 911-type…
Category: Writing
Interview with Madeline Miller, Author of Circe
Madeline Miller is the author of The Song of Achilles (Ecco, 2012), a novel that won the Orange Prize for Fiction and had me hooked from page one. On the surface it was a retelling of the famous warrior’s life,…
Jumping the Cut: Writing Transitional Scenes in the Netflix and Twitter Age
Ever since the first movie reel rolled, pundits have decried the end of the novel as we know it. To be sure, the novel has changed remarkably in the last fifty years and yet we only need to look to…
11 Writing Tips for Poor People
I appreciate writing tips from fellow writers. I love seeing how other people function and how they hope their successful patterns might be successful for someone else. But while the bulk of the advice out there is helpful, meaningful, and…
Time, Time, Time: What Have I Done?
In real life, I am generally good with time. I meet deadlines. I show up Canadian punctual (ten minutes early) to events. And I am usually aware of the date and time thanks to that job I have at MIT,…
What You Can Take With You
When you move cross-country, the last box you will pack is your writing box, because it is both the easiest and the hardest to do. It is the only box you clearly label on all sides, just the one word,…