1,000,000 Words
The other day I was talking to my partner, Todd, as we commuted on the MBTA (red line represent!) He asked how many books I’d written. I began the sophisticated process of counting on my hands. Nine. I’ve written (not…
The other day I was talking to my partner, Todd, as we commuted on the MBTA (red line represent!) He asked how many books I’d written. I began the sophisticated process of counting on my hands. Nine. I’ve written (not…
Let us suppose that an era comes, an era of undetermined length, where words come unmoored from meaning. A word like “compassionate” say. No problem. Easy enough to hang onto the definition: To be compassionate is to both understand and…
Dead Darlings is getting a much needed upgrade so we will be down for maintenance on Saturday (3/18) through Sunday (3/19). We’ll be back in business on Monday 3/20!
We are in tumultuous times and it is easy to dismiss art, music, writing, maybe particularly writing fiction, as a luxury. I think it is anything but.
As often as Show, Don’t Tell is drummed into us, it’s not always clear how to do it. Telling is sometimes necessary, even desirable in a sprawling novel, and the impulse to perform corrective showing can lead to page-count creep…
It wasn’t until I joined in National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) a few years ago that I finished a full draft of a novel for the first time. For anyone unfamiliar with Nanowrimo, it’s a national challenge to write a 50,000…