How High Are the Stakes? Building Better Conflict and Dilemma into Your Book

Dilemma is the problem your book solves, whether it is how to plant a bonsai garden or who killed the victim in a murder mystery. Dilemma, also known as the dramatic arc, forms the path of your reader’s journey through your book. Without strong dilemma, there’s no story.

One of my students, Chris, was writing the story of her grandmother’s life, but she wasn’t happy

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Acceptance and Rejection--Balance in the Creative Life

One spring, I was wallowing in the discontent of rejection letters. I’d sent my first novel to agent after agent, publisher after publisher. No one wanted it. This new novel crossed genres—it was written from the point of view of a young woman but it was meant for adult readers.

I believed in the book and wanted to see it in the hands of potential readers. But my disappointment was so great that

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Finding Theme in Your Book: An Exercise in Searching for Repeating Patterns

After months of revising my novel-in-progress, I was still stumped as to its theme. My chapters hung together pretty well but the manuscript lacked that wonderful sense of wholeness that a theme-rich book delivers.

One evening I was reading a scene to my writers’ group. When I finished we talked about the characters, especially the main character, a search-and-rescue pilot. One of the writers, bless her, asked me that pivotal question that opens huge doors inside.

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Feeling the Fear and Writing Anyway--Facing the Inner Critic

In each stage of writing your book, chances are you’ll meet a most unsavory part of yourself: the Inner Critic. It’s a negative self that delivers negative self-talk.  It casts its own particular light or shadow on your writing life, and it can stop you completely.

Many writers have different names for their critics. Sue Grafton, the mystery writer, calls hers ego. “Ego is the piece of me that’s going, How am I doing, champ?,” she says. “Is this good? Do you like this? Do you think the critics will like this?

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Creating the Page-Turner: Tricks to Great Pacing in Your Books

For twelve years, I wrote a syndicated weekly newspaper column. I only had six hundred words each week, so I learned to wrap the column neatly. The ending was always tied up with a clever image, like a bright bow on a tidy package.

When I went back to college for my MFA in fiction and began my first novel, this search for closure no longer suited my writing.  Novels explore, they expand, they lead to deeper secrets and more adventurous events.  When one of my teachers noticed this tendency to neaten up my chapter endings, she decided to broaden my understanding of pacing.  How it differs in books--as opposed to short pieces

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Expansion and Contraction: The Art of Working with Scene and Summary in Your Writing

Every book balances immediate writing in present time and writing that feels more reflective, that shares a passage of time or an overview of events. “Scene” and “summary” create different effects. In revision they need to be considered for placement and quantity in your book.

Imagine a story with nothing but scene. It feels very close-up and personal, with everything happening right in front of us, right now, a string of individual moments, all important and vivid. The pace is so ridiculously fast, though, there is little time to absorb the meaning of what’s happening.

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Building a Writing Practice That Helps You Realize, Access, and Sustain Your Creativity

Few books arrive fully formed. Rather they grow from regular, unflinching practice of our art and craft. Writing a book takes the same everyday hard work that tennis players put in practicing their volleys, swimmers their laps, violinists their scales.

Practice leads to developed skills.

I’ve found that approaching writing as practice, taking small steps rather than big leaps toward your goal, is a great soul-soother. It fosters the belief that

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Unconscious Competence

In my Madeline Island retreat on book-writing this past July, we were joined by a man who summered on the island.  He was retired from a very successful sales career and as he was a last-minute addition to the group and hadn't taken my book-writing workshops before, I wondered how he would do.

One sunny morning midweek, the class was struggling with the learning curve of three-act structure.  Suddenly Pete raised his hand with something to share.

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Creative Innocence versus Creative Resistance

It's September again.  Crisp school supplies, clean classrooms, launching into a fresh cycle of learning.  September for me is about being a beginner, as much as possible.

In fact, it's something I try to cultivate at this time of year.

Most of us resist not knowing.  We hate being seen as rank beginners.  We love being seen as

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Creative Tension and Sharing Our Work--Is It Time or Is It Premature?

A reader from Minnesota sent me a good question.  She'd taken my two-day book writing workshop at the Loft Literary Center in July, and I talked about the value of writers' groups, how they help support the book-writing journey.  She wanted to know more about that.

"I'd like to continue working on my book on my own," she emailed me, "and I still have a lot of 'islands' to write. You talked a little bit about writers groups and I was wondering how one goes about choosing/ finding a group? I haven't been involved in such a group since

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