blog

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, ...

It’s not just first-time writers 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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

“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 ...

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 ...

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 likely begin to diminish. If the actors were on opposite sides of ...

  The first draft is about diving into the unknown, invoking the muse, and writing from our right brains. The next step, the rewrite, is about switching gears. Basically, it is about becoming ...