One of the most important things I ever learned about telling stories was in Orson Card’s weeklong boot camp where we “workshopped” stories by doing zero workshopping. Zero critiques. In fact, critiques were verboten. Instead, Card asked us to simply provide a report of what he called the three grunts a reader makes when things
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How do writers juggle writing and family? One of my heroes is Mary Higgins Clark who, as a single mom, started a career. She got up very early, wrote for 1-2 hours in the morning, and became a mega-seller. I have four girls. And a full-time job. When the first two were little my wife was
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First of all, if I could look like Stephen R. Covey does in that picture, I would shave my head and never look back. Holy moly, I love that picture. But that’s not why I’m writing. James Maxey is a writer who I respect and whose comments on the boards of Codex Writers often make me think or
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Another great podcast by the Writing Excuses team, this time on style and voice: http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/10/06/writing-excuses-episode-35-voice-tone-and-style/ Quesion: is it dangerous as a writer to try to improve your style? A lot of respected authors say it’s foolishness to focus on style. Because story is what people want. Story is the thing. Put all the lipstick you want
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Watch an interesting Borders interview with Meyer about Host and Twilight. The thing I keep seeing in her interviews is that this woman follows her passion. She follows the story that wows her. It’s nice, of course, that millions of fans want to share that wow with her. But I don’t know that a writer
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