Writer’s block. It’s a thing. But it doesn’t have to be your thing anymore. It’s frustrating to feel stuck in your work, but you often only need to take a smallish action, usually one you’re not used to doing, to get through it and beyond it. Writer’s block is not the same as being burnt…
[You can check out the first Mother/Daughter Book Club post if you’re interested in reading thoughts from me and daughter Evelyn on Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, and This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. The second installment is all about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara…
Do I even need to talk about why the opening pages of your book are capital “C” critical? I doubt I do. Writers are readers, and you know how you either fall into a book or lean away from it, and then quit it, usually quickly. As an editor and writing teacher, I’ve spent years…
I’d been thinking about writing an article on the power of using an unexpected detail in a scene, and then the interior design folks on the internet made me aware of the “unexpected red theory”—just the catalyst I needed. The gist of the theory is that adding a bit of red to a room, where…
This past fall I read Rachel Stone’s debut novel, The Blue Iris. As a writing coach, one of the things that captured my interest was the fact that the book was written from multiple points of view—nine, to be exact. It’s not unheard of to do this (Lincoln in the Bardo fan here), but it’s…