You’ve had your fun, and your belly is full. Now, it’s time to get back to work, or keep the momentum going from NaNoWriMo. With more holidays on the horizon, it’s easy to slip into languor and laziness. Or you…
Everyone has to do research from time to time. When one reader exclaimed of my early sprawling draft, set in the 1930s and ‘40s: “You sure know a lot about a lot!” I did not take it as a compliment….
By Guest Contributor Kate Leary. In early September I finished the first draft of the novel I’ve been working on for a year. My kids were spending the week with their grandparents in Albany and my husband was backpacking with…
The great thing about the first draft is that it can be as stupid as you want. All you have to do is type shit into the keyboard. Then, after 80k words (or, you know, whatever) and one month to…
“There comes a time when you have to let the novel go.” “It will never be perfect.” “You can’t fiddle with it forever.” Yadda, yadda. So goes the writing advice about when to finally set a novel free in the…
Every revision has its own character. There’s the first messy revision, during which you try to cull from the confusing mass of pages some sort of a narrative. The second brings with it massive structural changes (in my case, cutting…