"Who's on first?" We're not talking baseball. We're asking: Who is the power person in a particular scene? Who is the ...

Not everyone wants to pay for an MFA degree, and I didn't either, for a long time, until I started writing fiction and realized I knew n...

I'll never forget the writer who approached me many years ago, asking me to read her work. "I can't read it myself," she s...

With the long winter wrapping up, it seems many of us are also wrapping up book projects. I'm hearing from quite a few writers in revisi...

One of my favorite writing-craft guides, often recommended to writers who want to hone their scenes in fiction and memoir, is The Scene Book...

I learned early in my writing career that just because a writer was brilliant--well reviewed, published, and capable on the page--that didn...

I've been thinking a lot this week about the ways we tell stories. Some writers come from a background of oral storytelling, as in gathe...

A reader sent me a poignant email a few months ago. She's writing a memoir and happened to show segments to her family--for all the best...

Revision is the final stage of the book journey, after the gathering of material and the forming of a rough draft, after the structuring tha...

In real life, people operate under unspoken agreements that try to keep the status quo--whether that status quo is calm or the opposite. I...