Critique helps you see your work with new eyes and shape it into what you always wanted it to be, only you weren’t able to get it there on your own. People say that writing is an isolated activity, but good writing requires company. Company that you ultimately love and cherish and value, and this … Continue reading
I was trying to write the wrong book, for the wrong reasons. My goal was to write the best book ever, so that my mother would be proud. So that teachers who made me feel quite small and thick would see that I was smart. So that friends, colleagues, strangers would applaud. So that I … Continue reading
The act of balancing one’s work writing with one’s personal writing is insanely tough, because the former has to naturally come first, since people are paying you for it. And then when it’s time to come home and do the writing one has to do, just to get it out there, it’s so tough. There … Continue reading
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. Joan Didion on keeping a notebook
Scientifically accurate storytelling is hard. Few creative individuals take the time to work out the details. You see, science fiction that operates in the universe we actually live in not only feels true, it also feels honest… Knowledge of and use of science reveals amazing revelations, curiosities, and unexpected truths that can enrich and guide … Continue reading
Stranger, pause and look; From the dust of ages Lift this little book, Turn the tattered pages, Read me, do not let me die! Search the fading letters, finding Steadfast in the broken binding All that once was I! ~ The Poet and His Book, Edna St. Vincent Millay
After the brief bivouac of Sunday, their eyes, in the forced march of Monday to Saturday, hoist the white flag, flutter in the snow-storm of paper, haul it down and crack in the mid-sun of temper. In the pause between the first draft and the carbon they glimpse the smooth hours when they were children– … Continue reading
“Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.” ― Don Roff Also known as ‘Just Get it Done’
At the point where language falls away from the hot bones, at the point where the rock breaks open and darkness flows out of it like blood, at the melting point of granite when the bones know they are hollow & the word splits & doubles & speaks the truth & the body itself becomes … Continue reading
Tropes are a funny thing. To some extent, knowing and expecting what’s going to happen next in a story – anticipating a particular structure and story elements – is why we’re drawn to specific genres and sub-genres… There is a benefit to this kind of comfort reading. It lets us take solace in predictable stories … Continue reading