Mountain Climbing
When a writer starts writing a novel, he or she is essentially standing at the bottom of a mountain, looking up. That writer is facing a zillion different moving parts that have to come together to ma ...
…you come to the end: then stop.
Endings are the point at which whatever changed in the protagonist’s life at the beginning has been resolved, and the story is over. Endings give many writers almost as much trouble as beginnings or m ...
Getting back on the horse
Writers are highly distractable people. In part, this is because it always looks like more fun to chase the cool new story idea than to slog through the miserable middle of whatever one is currently w ...
Rolling along
“Rolling revising” is a writing term that I think is fairly clear, but I’ll take a whack at a quick definition: Instead of writing a complete first draft from start to finish, the writer periodically ...
Partial Endings
When writers complain about having trouble with endings, most of the time, they’re complaining about the end of the story – either the grand climax when everything works out or fails miserably, or get ...
Developing ideas
A couple of weeks back, Rachel asked this: I was wondering how you work with and extend story ideas without getting bored? Because I have a habit of writing or imagining “moments” that really inter ...
Why is the Internal Editor such a problem?
The Internal Critic, aka Internal Editor, is the part of your brain that points out every single thing that is wrong with whatever you are doing (whether that’s writing or making a fancy dinner for yo ...
Choreographing scenes
Scene choreography or planning is a thing that some writers do up front, some do as a routine part of their process, and some hardly ever bother with even though they’re not pantsers, strictly speakin ...
Fixing What’s Broke, Part 2
Writers go about doing revisions in different ways, depending on the what and why of the revisions and on the writer’s personal best process for them. As always, there is no One True Way; if what you ...