My spouse and I just adopted a puppy. He's adorable at 14 weeks, and full of energy and sharp growing-in teeth. He is slowly, after a we...

A client told me about a recent meeting of her writing group. They discussed using present versus past tense when writing memoir. What were ...

I learned about the importance of transitions during my MFA study. One of my thesis advisers, a talented novelist, read my novel-in-progress...

Before I wrote books, I wrote stories, essays, and poems, columns and articles. Short stuff. Short stuff doesn't require that much orga...

"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...