Being a Writer in New England
My output is amazing during the winter. For me, cold, dark days are conducive to hunkering down and writing as is the soggy, cool springtime. But once warm, sunny, blue skies roll around, it is so hard to keep my…
Category: Writing Advice
Friday Feast: In Defense of Villainesses, Women Taking Charge, a Writer’s Guide to Hacking the Reader’s Brain (in 5 Steps), the Importance of Empathy as Craft, and What Happens When a Book Is Fatally Flawed
Maybe it’s because I’m writing a novel with two female leads who flirt with a whole heap of trouble. Maybe it’s because of the stunningly sexist commentary from the Olympics and the policing of women’s bodies on the regular. Whatever…
The Other!
Shakespeare did it. Flannery O’Connor did it. Jonathan Franzen does it all the time. Every playwright, short story writer, and novelist does it as a matter of course, yet there is still plenty of debate over the writer’s right to…
Friday Feast: 12-Step Writing Process, Writer’s Laze, Working Class Literature, Committing to Diversity When You’re White, and the Middle of Things: Advice for Young Writers
I love reading about the writing processes of authors. You never know what knowledge you can glean and what new nugget you can pop in your writer toolbox. I especially love that Margo Kelly, author of our first link, highlighted…
Through the Eyes of an Antagonist
My farm is a novel that writes itself over and over, year after year, always with a similar story arc: I plant, I tend, things go wrong, bugs invade. I fend off crows and raccoons. I pray for rain. I…
Friday Feast: An Open Letter to Authors at Bookstore Tables, How Rejection Shaped One Writer, How Novelists Recover History’s Marginalized Heroes, Donald Ray Pollock’s 5 Writing Tips, and What Makes a Bestseller
Aw. It’s sad to watch a poor, lonely author in a bookstore or at a book festival who simultaneously desires and dreads conversations with customers. Because people! Conversations! Eeek! And then there are those authors who flag you down like street canvassers…