I have twenty minutes to write, about anything, anything at all, and therein lies the problem, the problem of too much choice. I like limits. I adore constraints. Now I’ve got 19 minutes and eight seconds. Shit. I suppose I…
Here’s a comment my copyeditor, Jade Z. Scibilia, made about my last manuscript: “I laughed when you had Lynch mention the number of Johns in the police force (I recall we had to work on that in Idyll Threats). Buuuuut, we have…
Twenty years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by the novelist Robert Cormier. That night he said, “The reader doesn’t care what you were trying to write. The reader only cares about what’s on the page.” In…
“Writing a novel is to fabricate an elaborate lie. The end game is not to recreate reality.” -Craig Larsen in On Historical Fiction, True Stories, and not Recreating Reality on LitHub, October 7, 2016 I grew up in a small…
LOGLINE: A novelist must distill her story into a one-sentence logline, or she will fail to sell her book and will end up alone in a padded room. Anyone pitching a book can relate to the angst of writing a…
If you’ve taken a novel-related class at Boston’s Grub Street, it’s likely you’ve crossed paths with Lisa Borders. Author of The Fifty-First State and Cloud Cuckoo Land, Lisa developed Grub Street’s Novel in Progress classes, founded the Novel Generator, and…