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,…
Category: Writing
Missing Scenes
Sometimes when I’m working through a revision, I realize I haven’t given an event or a character proper consideration. The book suffers because I’ve buried in ‘telling’ certain events and characters who should have been ‘shown’ in scene. These are…
Note to Selves
As the result of a glitch in the new privacy settings on my email account, I inadvertently discovered a portal through which I can email my past and future selves. It turns out I am my own best therapist. Who…
An Interview with Leni Zumas, Author of Red Clocks
Leni Zumas’ new novel, Red Clocks (Little, Brown, 2018) was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, an Indie Next pick, and one of Esquire’s Most Anticipated Books of 2018. It is electric and brilliant. If you haven’t…
14 Things That Aren’t Writing, No Matter How Much You Want Them To Be
Being done with Grub Street’s Novel Incubator is a strange place to be. It’s kind of like being done with law school–sure, you graduated, but you aren’t a lawyer yet, and there’s that whole bar exam thing that is going…
How to Tell if Your Writing Deserves Praise – A Cosmo Quiz
Not too long ago, my good friend Julie Carrick Dalton sent me this comic from Chuck Draws Things: