1. Reduce ratio of calories consumed to words written. Remember that while Cheetos are orange like carrots, crunchy like carrots, start with a c like carrots, they are not actually carrots. 2. When people ask what the Novel Incubator is,…
Six years ago, I was finishing a first draft of my still-in-progress novel and got stuck at the final scene. My heroine needed to thwart an elaborate ATM scam run by her charismatic captors. How exactly had they pulled off…
If I had a patronus it would definitely be a bear. I know this because a bear I conjured up in mind—and wrote into my novel—crawled off the page and intervened in my real life. But yesterday, that bear died….
Meet Captain Happen—troublemaker, narrative enabler, change agent. The novelist, essayist, and poet, Charles Baxter talks about Captain Happen as one of several ways to increase urgency and momentum in fiction. Male or female, this kind of character shakes things up….
Lately, every time I get going on my writing I kill the buzz by thinking about what I’m doing wrong. When I wrote my first novel I plowed ahead blindly, but now I have a serious case of knowing too…
I have a thing for magical worlds. Every time Lucy opens that wardrobe, brushes past the musty fur coats, and walks into Narnia, I get a thrill. I like my escapes big. In psychology, I wrote about transcendent experiences. In…