Positive-training Your Creative Career
Olympic skater Alysa Liu rejected the rigid regimen imposed on her by her father and others and created her own…
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The Carrot and the Stick
If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here. Everything seemed fine when we first walked…
Revision Isn’t Always Renovation
I had a consultation this week with an author about her current manuscript we’ve been working on together. She was…
Writers: Dissect Your DNFs
It’s tempting, with a DNF, to simply close the book and move along to the next one in your TBR…
The Art of Seeing Others Deeply
Not long ago I read David Brooks’s book How to Know a Person, and much of it is based on…
What’s the Point?
One of the things that has been striking me lately is that regardless of your ideological or political beliefs, it…
Deepen Character Goal and Motivation: The Longing and the Lack
Figuring out why your characters do what they do can be some of the hardest work of writing, and a…
Deadlines, Expectations, and Reaching Beyond Your Grasp
As creatives pursuing a career in publishing, we are all essentially freelance entrepreneurs—meaning it’s up to us to create frameworks…
Plan to Build Your Writing Career
If you hope to write professionally and create a career from your creative efforts—whether it serves as your sole income…
Hope for the Holidays
Writers and other artists seem to me to be the purveyors of hope. That’s what art so often is. The…
Fixing Flat Characters and Flat Stories
It’s tempting to think in terms of good or bad, clear-cut categorizations and blanket judgments; it’s tidy and orderly and…
When Should You Hire an Editor?
If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here. Editors have a few inside jokes that…