Writers often use experiences from their real lives in their work. It’s important for the writer to understand the “nature” of the experience, rather than his idea of what happened. Writers can have a tendency to assume that the reader will understand the context of the situation, even though the context has been altered. By ...

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do? Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied. Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you? Hemingway: Getting the words right. (Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction,” The ...

“Action is eloquence.” – William Shakespeare If we find ourselves editorializing, that is telling or explaining what is happening in our story . . . it’s “OK” . . . however, we probably don’t want to stay on this track for too long. We want to get back to the action. We want to get ...

Did Stephen King set out to write a bestseller when he wrote his first novel Carrie? Apparently his wife found the first few chapters in the trash and convinced him to keep going. Did Norman Mailer plan on his first novel The Naked and the Dead making him a literary sensation? What about J.K. Rowling? ...

It’s not just first-time novelists that struggle with getting their story from the imagination to the page. Every writer struggles with this. Here’s the thing: Our idea of our story is never the whole story. When a writer holds onto his idea of the plot, he tends to get stuck. By exploring the nature of ...

Good storytelling is about having at least a somewhat conscious relationship to our ideal reader, and telling the story in the most compelling way possible. It is about understanding the most effective order of events. This is achieved through “holding the story loosely” and being willing to write and rewrite. The process of telling a ...

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, not even your hopes and dreams. We become utterly aware, in our bones, that despite all of our wishes, fantasies, and protestations, ...

When writers come to a dead stop there can be a tendency to panic. It’s important to remember that our idea of our story is never the whole story. When we try to figure it out, we tend to dig a deeper hole. Story is alchemy. As our novel progresses it becomes something else entirely, ...

Every open heart has an Antagonist When Gustavo Dudamel became the youngest conductor of a major orchestra, an L.A. Time’s journalist urged us not to get too excited about our newest conductor, counseling us that he was still young and unproven, that we should not rush to anoint him genius quite yet.  Dudamel is not ...

It’s not just first-time novelists that get stuck. Every writer, except Stephen King, experiences writer’s block. Writer’s block is often an absence of information. The information can be related to character or theme, though the writer usually believes that the stuckness is related to plot. It isn’t. Plot arises from character, and characters are in ...

“A problem cannot be solved with the same level of awareness that created it” — Albert Einstein We often have an idea of the direction our story is going, and sometimes we discover that, in fact, it does head in that direction, but not in the way we had anticipated. To some degree, we are ...

I work with first-time novelists all the time who desperately want to convince me that they can’t begin their first draft until they do more research. Research is important, and it’s also misunderstood. Particularly in fiction, we are more interested in the characters in relationship to each other than we are in the minutiae. It’s ...

  Those scant few words on the cover of our book or screenplay can be the most labor-intensive work of our entire manuscript. Coming up with a good title can be a bitch. We may have a working title, a place-holder, while we wait for that perfect title to jolt us awake at three in ...

For all you first-time writers struggling with the middle of your story, here’s something to remember. Our idea of our novel is never the whole story. The solution to getting through the middle of your first novel or memoir is to remove your focus from the “plot” and place it squarely on your character’s dilemma. ...

Forward, he cried From the rear And the front ranks died. – Pink Floyd (Us and Them) Hi Writers, We can tell a whole world in a sentence. The rewrite is where we polish our prose until it gleams. We remove all that does not belong in order to experience what remains. In the rewrite, ...

For all you writers struggling somewhere in the middle of your manuscript, here are five tips to get you to the end. 1) Create a deadline for yourself. Think of a practical timeframe to complete your work. If you’re going to be a first-time novelist, you’re going to need a first draft to work with. ...

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 reveals more than what we thought we knew. We are seeking to write something that after having written it, we can ask without guile, “Where did that come ...

A lot of writers want to dive right into their first drafts and start amassing pages. Though there are those novelists who claim not to outline, upon questioning (and I’ve asked many of them) I usually discover that they do outline in some form, though they don’t always write it down. Or they do write ...

  “Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -– as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is ...

For any writer, here’s a question to ask yourself: “Why do I want to write this novel?” 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 understand this motive, I don’t believe it’s a strong enough reason to complete ...

OK writers, 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 your novel or memoir hangs in the balance. You get a call that your friend needs help moving, or you get ...

Our story asks everything of us. If it didn’t, we would never surrender. How often do we live our lives as though we were not going to die? We make choices and even avoid opportunities out of fear. We tell ourselves that we can do it tomorrow. Confronting death is probably not something that appeals ...

Whether consciously or not, every writer is in search of a process. The outline is an often misunderstood element in the creative process. Some novelists eschew it completely, considering it to limit their imagination, while others set out to plot their stories so completely there will be no surprises along the way. As I see ...

A director told me once that if you put two actors together in a scene without directing them or staging the scene, that as the scene played out, the conflict would likely begin to diminish, that if the actors were on opposite sides of the stage, they would likely gradually drift toward each other, and ...