A Little Perspective
This is what I did this weekend: walked the dogs into Harvard Square, cleaned up my kitchen, shopped on Newbury St., read the Sunday New York Times, watched the first three episodes of Orange is the New Black, and booked…
Category: Revision
Four Things You Notice While Revising Your Novel
Here are four things you notice while revising. Maybe not the top four things, but definitely up there somewhere. In the top twenty. Based on a metric I made up just now and will not share. 1. You use the…
Revision Scream Queen
Every now and then, I reach out to writing friends and classmates I haven’t talked to in a while. Part of the reason is to ensure they’re not dead on the toilet*. None of them are dead, they’re just busy…
Master and Servant: My Outline and Me
My classmates called it my spreadsheet. It was a little embarrassing that to write a novel I needed a chart. 3 columns x 76 rows = 228 fields of information that I made myself fill in. I didn’t want to…
Voice Lessons for Writers
My daughter first sang in public when she was three years old. I can still see her in a dark-flowered dress, fearlessly belting out “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in a husky voice that someone once referred to as a whiskey…
The Secrets to Becoming a Writer
Stories, with their powers to transport us to distant lands and imagine ourselves as others, are magical. But I’ll tell you a secret. The writing of stories is not magic. Writers are regular people. They are regular people who are…