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“You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.” – Robin Williams In the realm of creativity, there’s a hidden truth that many overlook: a touch...

I got an email this morning from one of my students who just received a pile of notes on her work-in-progress and was feeling overwhelmed and unsure on how to proceed. Typically, I had some thoughts...

Do you feel loyalty pulling at you in your story? Isn’t it interesting how guilt emerges when you speak your truth? Why is it that standing up for yourself or setting a boundary brings with it a...

Doubt exists in each of us much of the time. We are unsure about our futures, our relationships, our new tile in the bathroom, our car insurance, etc. Doubt is the cradle of conflict, both internal...

A fundamental understanding of transformation is crucial to having anything more than an intellectual relationship to structure. You’ve probably read books on three-act-structure. But it is...

What’s the point of an outline? Whether consciously or not, every writer is in search of a process. A lot of writers want to dive right into their first drafts and start amassing pages. Though...

“How do I begin?” The process of story creation is mysterious. Where do your story ideas come from? From where do your characters emerge? At their core, stories are born out of an impulse...

When writers come to a dead stop there can be a tendency to panic. It’s important to remember that your idea of your story is never the whole story. When you try to figure it out, you tend to dig a...

What does it mean to trust yourself? It sounds like a good idea, but it is often a counter-intuitive process. It is sort of like the difference between certainty and knowing. Certainty lacks...

Sometimes the deeper we get into our story, the more we seek distraction. The internet will suck the life out of any writer. It will turn the most disciplined among us into bug-eyed addicts. Not only...

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates Years ago, I was on the phone with a prospective student, and he announced, “I will consider myself a failure if my book does not become a...

A director told me once that if you put two actors together in a scene without directing them or staging the scene, the conflict would begin to diminish. If the actors were on opposite sides of the...

“Home is where one starts from.” – T. S. Eliot There’s nothing more primal than our quest for home. The dilemma is that our childhood homes may have been confusing, chaotic, or even violent...

There are times, as storytellers, when we can be so bull-headed about what we want to express, that we end up pushing an agenda rather than telling a story.  We create “good guys and bad...

“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”- Ernest Hemingway Allow the Protagonist to Feel Reluctance No one likes change. The unknown is scary. The end...

“While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.” – Helen Keller The purpose of art is to illuminate the possibility for transformation. The goal of memoir is to make the...

“Where did that come from?” I believe there is something we writers are collectively seeking. We are all attempting to convey an experience, a true moment, to tell a story that somehow...

“The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious, you might never come home.” – Jeanette Winterson When my son was three years old, he was Captain Hook for Halloween. It was...