Writing necessitates a lifestyle. Some people write for precise amounts of time at precise times of day and some people steal minutes here and there to get the work done. When writers sit around chatting about their writing rituals, you’ll hear talk about what, if any, music they listen to, their favorite type of pen,…
The other night I was telling my husband that the vault of Prince’s music contains an estimated five thousand to eight thousand *unreleased* songs. That’s a ten-song album every six months for the next three or four hundred years, I told him. “What, did you go down a Prince rabbit hole or something?” he asked….
One way you can up your writing game is to challenge yourself to look for and eliminate the vast majority of “practical action” sentences in your prose. I’m referring to those functional movements your characters make to accomplish basic tasks. Things like coming downstairs in the morning or walking across the kitchen. The underlined sentence…
One of the biggest decisions you’ll make when writing a novel is where to begin. Of course, your story really begins well before page one, with all the events that made your world what it is and with all the experiences that made your characters who they are. But when we’re talking about page one,…
We know dialogue makes for good storytelling and that getting two people talking can make a scene interesting. But, of course, dialogue isn’t interesting just because it exists. The possible things your characters could say at any moment need to be curated and carefully shaped by you. That shaping means you’re going to want every…