Andromeda Romano-Lax

With the New Year underway, you may be charging ahead with vigor or smelling the first smoky whiffs of resolution burnout. Either way, you may find yourself wondering, “Enough with all the lists and goals. Can’t I just be happy?” Chasing happiness is usually a futile endeavor, experts tend to agree, especially when one is […]

Many of us have goals that feel so big, they’re almost shame-inducing. Why should a goal cause us shame? Maybe because we don’t want to admit our desires, especially if attainment seems unlikely. Maybe because we know that to achieve a big goal would be expensive or demand a lot of time away from our

Today, I gave in. I admitted that this simply wasn’t going to be a very productive week for many reasons: Worry about the war in Gaza/Israel. I was good at not reading news first thing in the morning for a while, but now, with the moment of a ground offensive upon us, I keep looking

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 won’t be excluding the suspense genre altogether. Truth is, many of us are intrigued by the notion of dabbling in this commercially successful category of fiction. Is it just because

“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 next two sentences, we get some precise description, enough to start creating a world and convince us to inhabit it. And then, we get a look at the man again.

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 is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.” I loved how that quote captures the two

Sometimes we just need the right word or phrase in order to bring a problem and its solution into focus. For me last month, that phrase was “Project Stacking.” I came across it in a newsletter by a comedy writer named Caitlin Kunkel, who learned it in grad school, in a program focused on writing

Photo caption: The face of a man who can’t come up with a good novel title. Have you ever heard about those parents who don’t name a child when he or she is born, delaying the choice for several days? It’s their legal right to do so. But the failure to name a baby seems,

Are you tired of Twitter? Allergic to TikTok? Resistant to making Instagram reels? For the last six months, I was. Having enjoyed learning some new social media skills in 2021—ah, those months when making reels was actually fun!—my interest began to fade in late 2022, especially as the algorithms kept changing. Then Elon Musk bought

I take that phrase from a newsletter I read this week by learning expert Scott Young. Reviewing The Handbook of Creativity by Robert Sternberg, Young synthesizes this takeaway: Creativity is a by-product of acquired expertise and a willingness to take intellectual risks. Lately I’ve been struggling to decide what my next novel will be. Over