Category: The Writer’s Life
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Why Are You Reading This?
Most blog posts save the Really Important Lesson for the last paragraph. I’m just going to cut’n’paste it right here: I write not because I “have to,” but because I want to be read. Thanks for reading. Skip to the bottom of this post and you’ll see the very same words. Are you still reading?…
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Writer Vs. Self-Editor
Once upon a time, there was a writer… Whoa, hold on there. Wait one darn minute, mister. Excuse me? “Once upon a time”? Really? Where’s the originality in that? Surely someone who calls himself a “writer” can do better. There was a writer… Pa-thet-ICK. Look, I’m just trying to… “Was.” Passive verb, my friend. You…
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10 Reasons You Don’t Have an Agent
Your writing is unremarkable. You may have worked hard to craft a good story, followed all the rules – trimming unnecessary prepositional phrases, chopping adverbs, replacing passive verbs with active verbs – but the result is indistinguishable from any of a hundred other novels the agent has reviewed in the past month. Solution: Find your…
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Inspiration, Perspiration and Aspiration
Thomas Edison is famously known for coining the oft-quoted phrase, “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” Some folks hovering in the shadows of the publishing industry have glommed onto this quote as a rallying cry for aspiring authors. “It’s not about talent – it’s about hard work,” they say. Well, they don’t…
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How Do You Write What You Don’t Know?
[Note: Stephen is currently collecting data on what it’s like to experience a great deal of pain (for use in some future work of fiction, of course), so this post is gonna be short. He’s really counting on a couple of you providing the bulk of the post in the comments section. Bring on your…
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I’m Good at Drawing Frogs
When I was 10 years old, I liked drawing almost as much as writing. And though I dabbled in the drawing of reptiles, particularly snakes (which are actually a bit more complex than one might assume, despite their limbless design), I became particularly adept at frogs. If you wanted a drawing of a frog, you…
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Let It Die
Is it time let your novel die? That’s a question every writer faces at least once in his or her writing life. The decision to pull life support is difficult at best, debilitatingly impossible at worst. You’ve worked on this novel for, what, months? years? How many hours have you invested? Even a poorly-written novel…