On working with writers
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The next step
I recently mentioned Terry Pratchett, who occasionally writes about a young witch, Tiffany Aching, and her obnoxious chums, the Wee Free Men, and if you haven’t read Sir Terry, you should. At any rate, he was still on my mind when I started writing this post, and I thought it appropriate to give a nod…
How a Book Is Born, Part 5
So I spent a lot of the last post talking about focus, and I touched a little bit on habit, how focus is connected to habit, and I thought I would be more explicit about that. You can’t write professionally – that is to say, meeting deadlines and producing good work at reasonable intervals –…
On how I work, illustrated
I spend a lot of my writing time doing this: By which I mean I spend a lot of my time staring out the window, not that I spend a lot of my time drawing sketches, although these days I spend a fair amount of time doing that, too. I call this, “Sometimes you have…
8 thoughts on writing about personal experience
Yesterday I wrote about how I think it’s important to be fair in writing about others when describing our personal experiences, but at the same time not letting those concerns stop us from writing about ourselves. Over the years, I’ve developed some rules of thumb for these kinds of essays: 1. Is it necessary…
How Droll: Pet Peeves
I’m usually a pretty patient reader, willing to give a writer the benefit of the doubt, but occasionally I come across a writer whose verbal mannerisms take me out of the story repeatedly, and then I stop being so patient. Recently I picked up a novel by a much-loved author (loved by other people; I hadn’t…
Writing the book of your heart
In the recent issue of a members-only magazine (thus no link here), a writer suggests that because the down economy has affected book publishing as it has affected the entire universe, editors are becoming more conservative and writers should write with an eye toward what the market wants (i.e., the tried and true). Now, she…