“Your use of the word ‘bloke’ is a mess,” Lincoln wrote to me over Facebook chat. I met Lincoln when I was on campus at Macquarie University, just outside of Sydney. I did my junior year abroad there seemingly a…
After a head injury, a lifelong word-lover – a voracious reader and dedicated writer – is forbidden by her doctor to read or write. She’s instructed to instead fill her time with “mindless activity such as television, which requires no…
A few months ago, I attended a one-day seminar on revision. The lecturer started off by asking the audience to describe “revision” in one word. Everyone laughed when somebody said, “Hell.” Except me. I know not everyone out there shares…
Whenever the topic of rewriting comes up, it seems to always be met with a communal groan and mumblings of, “Oh, god.” You know the feeling I’m talking about. You just finished a draft of your novel. You’ve spent months…
My high school best friend, Jen, and I were discussing books recently. She started telling me, with great enthusiasm, about a novel she had just read that she thought I would like. But she stopped mid-sentence and said, “Oh, never…
“Why isn’t this in the past tense?” Was the question. “By definition, all stories occur in the past.” I was stumped. There I was sitting in my writing workshop, years into a novel about which I had thought of absolutely…