I can’t count the number of stories I’ve heard where friends and family of a writer say things like “you should have a real job” or “that’ll never make money”. If we spend our lives told our writing is terrible, and we’ll never go anywhere, we absorb that into our psyche. It’s something everyone in...Read More

When editors, teachers, and other experts in the literary field talk about “structure” what they’re talking about isn’t some set of rules you have to comply with; they’re talking about the underpinnings of how stories function and have functioned since the earliest days of storytelling.Read More

There are definitely stupid questions. "Where are my sunglasses?" when I'm wearing them is a stupid question. However, when it comes to writing there are fewer "stupid questions" than we'd think.Read More

While luck does play a certain role in publishing, it's not the primary determiner of success, the primary determiner of success in modern publishing is the author.Read More

Having to part ways with someone is tough. There's no getting around the fact that you're going to be upsetting someone. However, the more polite, honest, and up front you are about it, the easier the whole process becomes.Read More

I don't think writer's block exists in the format many people ascribe to. We can hit dry spells or periods in our life where writing becomes difficult. That's real, but the problem isn't this ephemeral idea of writer's block.Read More

I am five drafts into this novel. Five. I finished it during NaNoWriMo in 2014, did a bunch of polishing and then set it aside for a year. Now I'm looking at it yet again, and I keep running into errors that make me want to scream, throw in my writing towel, and take up...Read More

I have seen a lot of Facebook questions and posts about passive voice that don’t quite explain it. Almost everyone who knows what passive voice is (or thinks they know what passive voice is) knows it’s bad, but they often have trouble identifying it. Given how prevalent the problem is, I thought I should address...Read More

More than once I have seen authors talking about what their timeframe for writing their novel should be, and some people have struggled with not quite understanding how long the writing, editing, and publishing process can take. I think NaNoWriMo has something to do with this. I have a close friend, Randall ‘jay’ Andrews, who runs...Read More

Continuing yesterday’s discussion of what the real differences between self-publishing and traditional publishing are, let’s step into the nitty-gritty and lay out the pros and cons (I was tempted to write “prose and cons”) so we can compare the two side by side. Now that we have looked at the steps required in putting together...Read More