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What Makes a Successful Creative Life?

What Makes a Successful Creative Life?

If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here. Earlier this year, at the age of 93, a woman named Betty Gordon cowrote and published her…
There's No Happily Ever After and the Good Guys Never Win

There’s No Happily Ever After and the Good Guys Never Win

One of the many little mantras I often repeat about story is that smooth sailing is narrative dead space. As soon as things are going consistently well for your character and they easily surmount obstacles and beat down challenges, readers grow bored and begin to disengage.

That Guy You Saw in That Thing That Time

That Guy You Saw in That Thing That Time

Most writers likely don’t imagine themselves trundling along as midlist authors. We rarely strive for “medium.” Many of us who pursue our calling in a creative career dream of the pinnacle of success: something along the lines of being a New York Times bestseller whose ubiquitous books are made into movies as they’re making bank from their writing.

Storytelling Makes the Story

Analysis: How Storytelling Makes the Story

If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here. My roommate when I lived in New York was (and is!) one of my closest friends, and…
Protect Your INstrument

Protect Your Instrument

Creatives tend to be such sensitively calibrated instruments that we may feel unrest and conflict around us even more keenly and constantly than most, and because imagination is our stock in trade, we can also easily spin out disaster scenarios that make the problems feel even more pressing and urgent and terrifying. How do you create amid chaos?