If you’re a first-time novelist, and you’ve yet to complete a manuscript, you may have had the experience of writing something, and getting stuck halfway through. Our idea of our story is rarely the whole story. It’s not that our idea is incorrect, it’s that it is incomplete. The challenge for the first-time novelist is ...

It is challenging sometimes for me to let go of my “idea” of my story, in order to allow the actual story to emerge. Let’s remember that we never need to impose anything, but rather inquire into the nature of our character’s fundamental dilemma. In the Coen Bros. darkly comic film, Burn After Reading, the ...

This is the only question you need to ask yourself at the end of the day. Nothing else matters, not the dishes, the oil change, or returning your buddy’s call to go see the new Transformers movie. Only after the writing is done do those things matter. Finish your work for the day. Yes, the ...

In a thrilling display of solidarity, the 90-Day Novelists finished their first drafts a couple of weeks ago and have begun their rewrites. The first draft was about diving into the unknown, invoking the muse, and writing from our right brains. This next step, the rewrite, is about switching gears. Basically, it is about becoming ...

Tod Goldberg is the author of the novels Living Dead Girl (Soho Press), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Fake Liar Cheat (Pocket Books/MTV), and the popular Burn Notice series, including The Fix, The End Game, The Giveaway, The Reformed and The Bad Beat (Penguin), and the short story collections Simplify (OV Books), a 2006 finalist for the SCIBA Award for Fiction and winner of he ...