Mao’s Head: The Quest for the Perfect Title by Michael Engelhard
“What’s in a title?” riffs David Petersen in Writing Naturally, his down-to-earth guide for aspiring nature writers. A good title, he answers himself, must grab ...
Staying In It by Sean Ulman
An awesome Autumn tumbles on auspiciously in Seward. I am on the verge of climbing back into a novel. Nesting up the desk. Preparing to ...
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Why We Write Suspense (Louisa May Alcott Did. Whaaat?)
Next month, I’ll be teaching a 49 Writers course about suspense as an element of all compelling writing. But in that course—and in this post—I ...
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When Writing Honestly Makes You a Bad Wife and Mother by Summer Koester
“You always say the brutal truth,” my nine-year-old said the other day. “You really should try to do more ‘white lying’.” Here’s the thing: I’m ...
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Getting Off the Couch and Embracing Doubt by Lucian Childs
In my last blogpost, I touched on the inevitability of doubt in the creative process. It’s such an important issue, I thought I’d speak about ...
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Suspense, Regardless of Genre: Tips for Reading and Writing by Andromeda Romano-Lax
“On the path ahead, stepping out from behind a boulder, a man appears.” So begins Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am. In the ...
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The Writer’s Healthy Delusions by Andromeda Romano-Lax
For years I kept a handful of John Steinbeck quotes on my office wall, among them: “The writer must believe that what he is doing ...
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It Takes a Family to Write a Novel by Lucian Childs
This June something extraordinary happened. I published my debut novel, Dreaming Home. It has already gotten positive notice, including—unbelievably to me—a favorable review in The ...
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Why Flash? by Rich Chiappone
So, yesterday I was writing this sentence, and the fancy grammar-check tool in my laptop caught me failing to practice what we preach in “flash” ...
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