Many years ago, when my books were first being published, I took a class on reading my writing aloud.  It was taught by a television a...

Plot is the most basic outer-story structure your book can have.  Fiction and memoir plots are all about action--what happens, where it...

Dialogue isn't easy to write well.  In fact, it is one of the red flags that editors use to spot an amateur writer.  Maybe it'...

Patricia has taken my online class and read my book, You Book Starts Here. She wrote me last week with a good question about how to prot...

The short-story writer, André Dubus, described writing as having vertical and horizontal moments. In an interview for the anthology, No...

I worked with a writer a few years ago, who was writing a fascinating story.  He'd been through serious medical trauma, and he wa...

Marcia Ballinger, new author of a nonfiction book called The 20-Minute Networking Meeting, had the goal to assist executives who were i...

One of the most common questions in my book-writing workshops is this:  How do you keep your book-in-progress organized during the year...

Writers come to my classes to learn structure.  There aren't many classes that teach it, I've found, and it's my specialty...

A student in my class, Samantha, was writing a difficult passage in her memoir, recounting the effect of her father's death on her ...