The Quiet Moment When a Story Finally Starts Feeling Real There’s a moment in some drafts, not all of them, but some, where something shifts. It’s hard to describe. Nothing… Read more
The Difference Between a Story Idea and a Story That Actually Survives the Draft I have a folder on my computer called “Story Ideas” with over sixty entries in it. Premises. What-ifs. Characters I… Read more
Why Some of My Favorite Sentences End Up Getting Deleted There’s a sentence I wrote about six months ago that I still think about sometimes. It described the way a… Read more
I Rewrote the Same Scene Five Different Ways and Here’s What Changed Each Time A few weeks ago, I got completely stuck on a scene. Two characters, a kitchen, a conversation that needed to… Read more
The Awkward Middle of a Story and Why I Always Want to Quit There There’s a specific point in every story I write where I start to believe I’ve made a terrible mistake. It… Read more
What Happens When You Let a Character Make a Bad Choice on Purpose I was about three chapters into a short story when I realized my protagonist was about to do something incredibly… Read more
The Characters I Accidentally Abandoned and What They Still Taught Me I found the file last week. Buried in a folder I hadn’t opened in maybe two years, there was a… Read more
I Stopped Trying to Sound Like a Real Author and My Writing Got Better I spent way too long trying to write like I thought writers were supposed to write. You know the feeling?… Read more
Writing Scenes I Know Will Never Make the Final Story (And Why I’m Doing It Anyway) Last week I spent two hours writing a conversation between my protagonist and her dead grandmother. It takes place in… Read more
I Tried Writing Without a Plot for 30 Days and Here’s What Actually Happened So there I was, stuck again. Just completely stuck. You know that feeling where you’ve got your document open, maybe… Read more
