first-time novelist

I was a half decent 800-meter runner in high school, not great, but I ran with a lot of heart, and sometimes I placed near the front. It’s a tough race, as it requires both speed and stamina. It...

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...

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...

Many authors share a similar fear: “What will people think?” It looks slightly different for each writer. What will my parents think when they find out I have these thoughts? What will my friends...

Plot versus Theme Any writer can experience that moment where you suddenly realize that your “idea” of the story isn’t going to get you to the end. Maybe you had a plan, but now the characters have...

For any writer, here’s a question to ask yourself: “Why do I want to write this?” A student told me recently that he was writing his first novel in order to sell it for a lot of money. Though I fully...

Every writer hears the old song: “Write what you know.” This can be misunderstood. The fact is, we don’t write what we know, but rather, we write the nature of our experience. A plumber doesn’t have...

Have you ever experienced great loss? Whether it was a parent, spouse, or friend, the experience pulls you sharply into the present moment. Nothing else matters, not the barking dog, the unpaid bills...

Finding Your Way As you write each day, you discover your own process. You begin to see there is no “right way” to create and that your objective is simply to let the story live. The first draft is a...

Be open to possibilities When I wrote my first novel Diamond Dogs, I had the idea that my hero, a high school senior, gets rid of the body. He accidentally kills a kid while driving late one night on...

“In order to share one’s true brilliance one initially has to risk looking like a fool.” – Criss Jami Writing your first story is sort of like, well . . . there’s a first time for...

  Technique develops over time. By reading and writing, we absorb a sense of story structure, cadence, and rhythm. We learn how to create and release tension. We deepen our relationship to our...

The first step in creating a fully alive story is imagining the world. This simply means envisioning your characters in relation to each other and asking, “What happens next?” With each...

You’ve begun working in earnest. The story is alive, your cylinders are firing. You’re getting up every morning and putting in the hours. But then, something happens. Life delivers a distraction, and...

Creativity is your birthright. We live in a culture that is invested in our believing otherwise. I frequently hear folks talk of talent as though it’s a finite commodity. People tend to think...

So many of my students and potential students come to me wanting to know how to get published and produced. They want their work to be read, to be seen. But what they really want is for themselves to...