Category: How To and Tips
Unstuck: Feedback That Stops You Cold By Martha Conway
This blog series, Unstuck, explores some of the ways fiction writers find themselves stuck and offers tips from successful writers for getting unstuck. Unstuck is a six-month series published the first Monday of the month. Read the previous installments: WRITING THE BEGINNING OVER AND OVER UNSTUCK STUCK IN THE SQUISHY MIDDLE “Here’s what I would do instead …” […]
Writing When Hurt, Writing To Heal
It could have been the ideal conditions for writing non-stop: no running of errands with necessities delivered to the door, no interruption by visitors, no annoying events, simply solitude at home. For me and many others, however, the COVID pandemic shutdown didn’t work out that way. It was like a bad first draft which stumbles […]
WHAT INSPIRED THE BOOK BIBLE? by Susan Shapiro
Susan B. Shapiro is an award-winning Manhattan writing professor and The New York Times bestselling author of 10 books, including the acclaimed memoirs FIVE MEN WHO BROKE MY HEART, LIGHTING UP and ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR WORD, the coauthored nonfiction books UNHOOKED and THE BOSNIA LIST, and the novel WHAT’S NEVER SAID. Her books […]
Why I Write Funny Mysteries
By Kelly Oliver Using Humor is Serious Business When I was in graduate school (a million years ago), a guy invited me over to his place for a dinner date and served Chardonnay and Captain Crunch cereal. To be fair, he was living on a grad student stipend and had to economize, and Captain Crunch […]
8 Things I’ve Learned Since Becoming a Published Author
By Caroline Bishop In February 2021 my debut novel was published. Seeing THE OTHER DAUGHTER on bookshop shelves and in readers’ hands was the culmination of a long-held dream for me. It was also a highlight of a rollercoaster ride full of brilliant highs, a few pandemic-related lows and several spells of trundling along wondering […]
Inspiration through Memoir and Self Help
Most of us carry stories from our past; some carry weeping wounds. Our tales can lift us up or anchor us in the depths of grief or rage. They can inspire or defeat us—and influence readers around the world. The story I carried, my dream since age fifteen, was to find an elusive waterfall I […]
Telling Family Secrets
Telling Family Secrets Have you ever peeked into the intimate lives of your parents? In May of 2006, three years after my father died, my mom insisted that I take home boxes full of letters, personal diaries, journals, newspaper articles, and books written by and/or about my parents, who were Mennonite medical missionaries in Paraguay, […]
Writing Cookesville USA
I was born and lived the first twelve years of my life in a town called Owensboro, in northwestern Kentucky, on the Ohio River. My family and I moved to Orange County, California when I was twelve, where I lived until I married at the too-young age of nineteen. From there, I moved to San […]
Writing THE LOBOTOMIST’S WIFE: A Braid of Facts and Imagination
Writing is my second act. Almost a decade ago, after I gave up my full-time corporate job to take care of my two young children, I found myself searching for something “of my own” outside of the home. I’ve always liked to write but hadn’t considered a novel until I took a beginner novel workshop […]
Keeping Your Series’ Setting and Secondary Characters Fresh
Keeping Your Series’ Setting and Secondary Characters Fresh Readers fall in love with settings and secondary characters, anxiously awaiting the next story because it means another trip to a place we all want to live or at least visit. Series are a special kind of escape for readers and writers. For me, as author, the […]
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