Category: Meet the Editor

Now, as far as genius, you think I’m going to say, “Shut up and write,” don’t you? But unfortunately that won’t make you a genius. It won’t even make you a writer. That will only make you a scribbler, which isn’t a bad thing to be, at all. . .but… Read more“1 Secret Trick to Becoming a Genius Writer in One Day”

We’re talking this month about instantaneous ways to improve craft—because, as Carrie Fisher says, “Instant gratification takes too long.” We’ve talked about 2 Tricks to Breaking Writer’s Block in One Day. And 3 Tricks to Increasing Tension in One Day. Now let’s talk about how you can use your own… Read more“4 Tricks for Improving Your Fiction in One Day”

I love the idea that so much of learning to write well starts the instant you learn it. What a fabulous craft! Last week we learned 2 Tricks for Breaking Writer’s Block in One Day. Now for the rest of the month we’ll be talking about other tricks that also… Read more“3 Tricks to Increasing Tension in One Day”

We’re going to spend this month talking about tricks of the trade that work in one day. There are a lot of them, and with all of us struggling to juggle work, family, social life, and writing (plus all that time we wind up paying attention to marketers to whom… Read more“2 Tricks for Breaking Writer’s Block in One Day”

And now that we’ve plotted wrong, characterized wrong, and written wrong. . .let’s talk about how to sit down with that baby and revise it wrong. Be obsessed with letting your language ‘breathe’ This is code for: “Be unwilling to revise anything but inexcusable errors and typos.” This is because… Read more“How to Revise Wrong, in 3 Easy Steps”

Last week we learned how to characterize wrong. The week before that we learned how to plot wrong. And today I’m going to teach you how to cripple your book so that—even if your plot is maximum overdrive and your characterization nothing short of brilliant—no one in the industry will… Read more“How to Write Wrong, in 3 Easy Steps”

Last week we learned how to plot wrong. That was fun! Now we all know how to do it so nobody will ever be interested and our stories will never get published, much less read. Interestingly enough, when I wrote this whole series two years ago it was the post… Read more“How to Characterize Wrong, in 3 Easy Steps”

April is the cruelest month. —T.S. Eliot Apparently bank clerks really have a hard time with certain months of the year. Of course, the last person you’d expect to write canonical poetry is a bank clerk. So I’m going to spend this month talking about how to do everything backward…. Read more“How to Plot Wrong, in 3 Easy Steps”

I always take the a week to go bask in the summer sun with my beloved family—sitting on the swing with my bare toes in the lawn, admiring my beautiful vegetables bursting gloriously from their beds, smelling the rich, green scent of heat, and yelling at the cats for looking… Read more“4 Ways Writing Reminds Us We’re Alive”

We have this convention at our house where, whenever someone says something especially hilarious, we write it down on a yellow-sticky and stick it to the refrigerator. As you can see, when you post yellow-stickies of your best dialog on your refrigerator, it eventually becomes a veritable blizzard of yellow-stickies…. Read more“3 Reasons Dialog is Important, 3 Reasons It’s Not”