I love motivational quotes and mantras. But here was a time when I was embarrassed to admit it. I felt like hanging up an inspirational quote by my desk was kind of like displaying a cliché word art plaque (Live, Laugh, Love people, I do love you). I didn’t want to adorn my office with the stuff of bad self-help…
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Writers hate asking, but they need our help. For many of them, book deals are hard to get, advances are small, publicity budgets are meager, and a writer’s publishing future depends mostly on the love they get from their readers. I’ve come up with some ways to help authors, even if those authors already wrote a NYT bestseller. After all,…
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The first line of your memoir (or essay or novel) might come to you early on, fully formed. Or it might be a line you compose late in your drafting cycles. Either way, at some point you’ll have to evaluate it for the work it’s doing. Your opening sentence is a tone-setter, and you want your approach to the entire…
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The ability to describe is the key to great storytelling, but when it comes to depicting characters, our first impulse is often to go straight to the basics (height, hair color, clothing) and leave it at that. It’s not that those descriptions are bad, it’s just that they provide surface-level characterization rather than truly characterizing. Dwight Swain, in his book…
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I recently learned that the Japanese have a word—“tsundoku”—for the habit of buying reading material and letting it pile up. I love that someone named this phenomenon. I adore my baskets of magazines, shelves of books, and nightstand pile. Until now, my word for this has been “decorating.” Every new book in my hands is a new chance to learn…
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