(Image from Life is Beautiful, 1997) If you’re going to write a tragedy, infuse your story with humor. Humor pulls us towards the characters and makes us care. It also ensures that your ending will …
Conflating Characters
Sometimes we’ve written characters that don’t belong in our story because their function is redundant. Conflict might arise that don’t add anything new to the story. In fact, the conflict might …
Building Sentences
“You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences."- Anatole France There are no rules that limit the length of a sentence, but when our sentences are …
Own Your Work
Just because you might be a first-time novelist, it doesn’t mean you’re not the authority over your work. No agent, publisher, or film producer knows more about the inner workings of your story than …
The Great American Novel
Every American writer secretly dreams of writing the “Great American Novel.” What would that look like? It’s a book that captures the zeitgeist, that taps into something intrinsic to our national …
Our Characters are Malleable
“Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened.”- P.L. Berger In the rewrite we're like …
Reframing Your Protagonist’s Goal
“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by …
How to Become a First-Time Author
The journey to becoming a first-time author is different for everyone. For me, it involved letting go of the idea that I’d ever get published. I know this sounds counter-intuitive. The temptation …
How to Write Your First Novel
Writing your first book might actually be fun. I’m serious. I know you’re terrified. It’s a scary thing to do. But, at the risk of sounding like I was raised on a Portland commune, that fear is just …
Narrative Drive
“The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.”— Scott Turow If you’re rewriting and a point in your story feels flat, here are some questions you can ask yourself: 1) …