I'm reprinting this post from 2012 because I get more questions about it than almost any other. Enjoy! This month, my novel-in-progress ...

One of my favorite winter traditions in our book-loving family is the box of books we give each other for the holidays. Sometimes they come ...

Every now and then in my classes, a writer would ask about series. it takes a dedicated soul to even consider a clutch of books and plan for...

In a past post, I wrote about the helpful triad of the creative artist's life: will, vision, and comfort. I heard about this from a song...

I enjoy Loft teaching colleague Elizabeth Jarrett Andrews' occasional newsletter, PenFeathers . Her recent issue was about the challenge...

This isn't an easy subject to write about. It's simpler for writers working on short projects---essays, stories, articles, blog post...

Books, being the long and onerous journey that they are, often benefit from the break of shorter writing projects. I've written about th...

I've written a lot in these newsletters about the stages of writing a book--the gathering of ideas, the play that comes next as the writ...

I love summer and fall but I long for winter for its stillness. I'm best able to vision in stillness--and by that, I mean clearly see wh...

Stellar first chapters are a bear to write. They are also essential if you want to sell your book to a publisher. Most "samples" o...