Friday, February 3, 2023
Five Gates You May Encounter as You Plan, Write, and Develop Your Book
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An important lesson I learned as I wrote and published my books was this: there are predictable gates, or passages, in the journey. These ar...
Friday, January 27, 2023
The Surprising Benefits of "Download" Writing Every Day
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At a gathering this past week, a friend was talking up Morning Pages, the stream-of-consciousness writing activity proposed by Julia Cameron...
Friday, January 20, 2023
Revision Checklists--Super Handy Tools for the Final Stages of Your Book Project
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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 ...
Friday, January 13, 2023
What Are You Reading Right Now? (And Why That Question Is Vital to Your Book)
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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 ...
Friday, January 6, 2023
Writing a Series--If You're Called to Connected Stories, Some Important Tips
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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...
Friday, December 30, 2022
Setting New Year's Goals for Your Writing--Tips, Ideas, and Why It's Fun and Helpful
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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...
Friday, December 23, 2022
Rest Breaks and Nonproductive Periods--How They Benefit a Book
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I enjoy Loft teaching colleague Elizabeth Jarrett Andrews' occasional newsletter, PenFeathers . Her recent issue was about the challenge...
Friday, December 16, 2022
When to Give Up on a Book Project--and How to Tell
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This isn't an easy subject to write about. It's simpler for writers working on short projects---essays, stories, articles, blog post...
Friday, December 9, 2022
Story Cycles and Essay Collections--How to Think about Order, Flow, and Transitions
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Books, being the long and onerous journey that they are, often benefit from the break of shorter writing projects. I've written about th...
Friday, December 2, 2022
What's the Point? Why the Purpose of Each Part of Your Writing Feels So Important to Your Reader
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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...
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