Writing Tools
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
What Does It Really Mean When People Say Your Character is Unsympathetic?
Christina Baker Kline
Ever since I started noticing the typos in Nancy Drew books, I’ve loved to edit. In high school I convinced my mother, an overworked English...
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
Why Tried and True Advice Can Doom You
John Wray
Two of the most dangerous sinkholes I fell into as a developing writer were very much part of the creative writing dogma of the time, and continue...
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
The Thirty-Year Novel
Leora Skolkin-Smith
As part of surviving the long, lonely hours of writing a novel about madness that I was certain would continue to be rejected by publishers...
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
Research in Fiction—Necessary But Dangerous
Helen Benedict
As someone who writes both journalism and fiction, I have often struggled with how to balance research and imagination.
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
Procrastination and the Necessary Fight
Dani Shapiro
It’s always just me versus me. From the moment I wake up in the morning–pack my son’s lunchbox, scramble a couple of eggs, feed...
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
On Finding Your Material
Sheila Kohler
Finding our material is one of the most essential parts of our work as writers. It is difficult, first, to find material with heat—dangerous...
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
What's in a Title?
Erika Dreifus
I learned lessons about “quiet” fiction back in 2001, when a literary agent began circulating my first book-length fiction manuscript...
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
Writers and Self-Sabotage
Bonnie Friedman
I used to induce in myself awful states of envy. It took years to notice what I was doing, though, because it was so counter-intuitive
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
Getting Unstuck
Caroline Leavitt
If you’re a writer, you know the routine. You’re halfway in the middle of your novel or story and suddenly you feel stuck
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Writing ToolsWriters on Writing
Huskies, Hackneys
Roxana Robinson
All the fiction I write arises from the same sort of impulse: it’s a feeling of discomfort, a kind of unspecified anxiety, a need to uncover...