This week's exercise is to do something wonderful for a beloved writer in your life.  Maybe yourself!  Here's a short list of my f...

Judy, a reader from Minnesota, sent me a very good question about her manuscript: "I took your class this summer on 'how to write ...

A reader from Virginia wrote me:  "I’m either writing a very boring memoir which is filled with the ME in memoir, or I’m writing some s...

The relationship of writer with book-in-progress can be likened to a marriage as opposed to a date.  Poems, articles, columns, and short sto...

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who celebrate this week.  In honor of the holiday, when maybe we all can get a tiny bit more leisure time...

Where I live in northern New England, it's getting toward winter.  The trees have lost most of their leaves, and it got so chilly last n...

Right now, as you read this, hundreds of thousands of writers from around the world are focused on one thing, a  crazy but effective approac...

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, ...

One spring, I was wallowing in the discontent of rejection letters. I’d sent my first novel to agent after agent, publisher after publisher...

After months of revising my novel-in-progress, I was still stumped as to its theme. My chapters hung together pretty well but the manuscrip...