Category: Rewriting

How Nothing Helped My Writing

I have difficulty sitting, a condition I treat with an ever-present pillow and an unusual form of therapy — one I find instructive as a writer. I practice doing nothing. I was turned onto this ‘nothing’ therapy by Dr. David…

Opening Old Boxes

The end of year always puts me in the mood to clean. A new year might be an arbitrary marker of time passing, but finishing up a calendar fills me with the desire to say good-bye to some things, to…

Your Research is Showing

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….

The Trouble with Endings

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…

Unpenned: Turning the Novel Loose

“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…