So, First Draft, we meet again. I just finished your brother a few weeks ago and stuck him in a (virtual) drawer. Don’t worry. You’re definitely meeting the same fate. Oh, stop screaming. Doesn’t the certainty of what’s going to…
I had written twenty, maybe thirty, pages of my first draft when I had the idea of setting the climax at a theme party. I thought it would be fun to put my characters into costumes and get them in…
A few weeks ago, when I walked out of the theater after seeing Moonlight, I experienced a feeling akin to what I felt three days ago when I closed the cover of Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and sat back and…
The members of my writing critique group comment on my manuscript. That’s what they’re there for: to offer suggestions, to help steer me in the right direction and to give me their gut reaction to my work. Most of the…
Fortunate are the writers whose first germ of a novel is a plotline, a concept, a scene, or a theme – ideas that provide a starting point, the bare bones, a guide. Then there’s me. Having grown up in Wisconsin with…
We all know that exhilarating feeling of banging out a first draft when the ideas are flowing, the characters are talking and pages are filling of our their own volition as we put our vision into words. There’s no better…