Category: How To and Tips
Writing Into The White Heat
Dare you see a soul at the white heat? Is Emily Dickinson’s first line and title of her 1862 poem. The soul; a passion so intense it burns white, hotter than the fire itself. The passion, for me, is writing. My words when I get them on the page are unfinished, they are imperfect, they […]
Creating a New Home for Readers—and Myself
Many years ago, while writing my first novel, Each Vagabond by Name, I obsessed over every detail of character and story, making sure I got everything exactly right. I spent weeks researching a backstory for bartender Ramsy, ensuring that the way he was injured in the Vietnam War was realistic, moving, and thematically significant. I […]
Inspiration for A Taste of Sage By Yaffa S. Santos
We are living in times where many of us could use the perfect distraction. Times where many of us are returning to the kitchen to experiment, or possibly doing it for the first time. Times when there are many days when all we could use is a fun, romantic story and a laugh. None of […]
WRITE LIKE NOBODY’S JUDGING: THE IMPOSTER SYNDROME AND HOW I FIGHT IT
Unless you’re some kind of a narcissist, you have at some point or the other heard a little voice within yourself going, “Psst! You don’t have what it takes to do what you’re doing. You’re a fraud and everyone knows it!” Call it what you will – your inner critic, plain underconfidence or its fancy […]
Beneath The Fig Leaves: An Excerpt
As a child, books fascinated me; intrigued by their stories I often slipped into their world. If words and stories could make me feel so many different things, then I, too, wanted to write, to make others feel the same sense of excitement and wonder. My curiosity and imagination were relentless, as far as I […]
How Writing Groups Can Help Develop Your Writing
The published writers I know have one thing in common. They’ve all worked for years to become overnight successes. It’s often difficult to see through their thousands of sales and glowing reviews, but behind it all there’s usually years of blood, sweat and tears. When people ask me what makes a successful writer, I always […]
My Experiences Writing and Publishing as a Teen
For me, the biggest difference between writing as a teen and as an adult is being able to write how teenagers think, what it’s like to be in school, because you’re not looking at it through rose-tinted glasses, looking back on it with nostalgia; you don’t have to remember what it was like, you’re still […]
Happiness in the Time of Covid-19, Climate Change, Violent White Supremacy, etc.
Perhaps surprisingly, a season of unrelentingly grim news is the perfect time for a serious discussion of both personal and collective happiness. That is because genuine happiness is the opposite of a self-indulgent quest for pleasure. Rather, deep inner happiness leads to thriving, performing at our best, and greater compassion – along with a much-needed […]
Unexpected Friendship: Barbara Monier
In my fourth novel, The Rocky Orchard, the bulk of the book centers around the unlikely friendship between two women – one young and the other elderly. The book’s lead character Mazie stands on the porch of her family’s second home in the mountains of rural Pennsylvania the morning after she has arrived there. Awash […]
My Top 7 Memoir-Writing Lessons
Writing memoir is a tricky thing. Memoirists, like me, find real-life images to describe weaving life events into the story of our lives. For the seamstress, it’s like fashioning fabric; for the potter, molding a lump of clay into something recognizable; for the builder, it’s construction from the foundation. As a former Mennonite, my history […]
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