Under Pressure
People used to ask, “When is your next book due?” and I would laugh, self-consciously, because I didn’t have deadlines. I wasn’t a writer who had contracts or editors waiting for me to produce anything. In those bygone days, I…
People used to ask, “When is your next book due?” and I would laugh, self-consciously, because I didn’t have deadlines. I wasn’t a writer who had contracts or editors waiting for me to produce anything. In those bygone days, I…
From Hogwarts to Whoville every fiction writer constructs a world. It’s an artful business even when the settings are based on real places. The best ones are indelible.
I need to finish my outline. I need to take the trash out. I need to be spending time researching. I need to do the laundry. I need to revise that chapter. I need to go to the grocery store. These to-dos buzz around my head like mosquitoes on…
Sit in front of your computer for hours. If you only write one word, that’s ok, you wrote one word. Subscribe to lots of literary magazines so that you can tell people that you subscribe to a lot of literary…
In April I hiked through Zion National Park. I stood gape-mouthed, staring at the burnt orange, gold, and greens in the walls of a canyon so deep it made me dizzy. Layers of sedimentary rock rose up in swirling stripes…
Often I feel like I’m stealing time from everything else I should be doing to write. Or else, I’m living the nightmare of an “I’d rather be fishing” bumper sticker. In this metaphor fishing = writing. It’s a constant trade-off…