Technology and Process

Technology changes the way we work. Everybody knows this, but there is nothing quite like having your Internet go out to bring it home to you. Last week’s infrastructure failure made me think about how my writing process has changed over time. I started my first book

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Perfectionism

“Aiming for perfection is what causes people to stay stuck.” –Alice Boyes My brother recently took a class in gem-cutting. When he finished, he told me that a “perfect” cut is a matter of magnification. What looks perfect to the naked eye is a bit off when

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Why Writers Get Stuck, Part 2

Last week, I talked about the three most common reasons for a writer getting stuck:  first, that it’s actually part of their normal process, second, the fear of some stretchy or tricky bit that comes next, and third, that they’ve actually made a mistake and their backbrain

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Making it Perfect

Everyone I know wants to do good work. Very few will admit to wanting their work to be perfect, either because they’ve had “nothing’s perfect” drummed into them, because they don’t want to appear to be saying that they are so good they can write perfect fiction

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Getting the book out of the bucket

It’s a new year, and for the last week or so, people have been talking about New Year’s resolutions and bucket lists. “Write a book” seems to turn up with enormous frequency on lists like “The Top Fifty New Year’s Resolutions of 2015/16/17/18” and “100 Things You

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Looking for Perfection

A long time back, I heard a story about a man who wanted a famous artist to draw him a picture of a cat. “Come back in a year,” the artist told him. A year later, the man returned, eagerly anticipating the masterpiece that had taken the

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Outlines and Revising Them

There are two sorts of outlines that writers do: submission outlines and planning outlines. A submission outline is my term for the one you send to the agent or publisher in hopes of selling the book. A planning outline, on the other hand, is a writing tool.

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What drives the story

“What drives your story, plot or characters?” There are a bunch of problems with this question. First off, what drives the story isn’t an either-or dichotomy; it’s a continuum that runs from the total-action-with-cardboard-characters tale at one end to the nothing-but-character-introspection story at the other end, with

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