I’d like to thank Ann Finkelstein for asking me to participate in this blog hop. I’ve been neglecting my blog, and this gave me a reason to get back to it. Ann is a talented writer and photographer whose YA fantasy is now out on submission. You can read about her writing process here. I’m … More Blog Hop!
Once upon a time, I used to agree that picture book writers had to put much more time into selecting each individual word than novelists. After all, picture book writers can have anywhere from seven words to three thousand words to work with as they work to tell an entire story.* I can’t speak for every novelist, … More Opening Up
Here’s an excerpt from Sue Bradford Edward’s recent blog post at Women on Writing: For about two months, I’ve been playing around with a rewrite. I’ll work on it a bit and then set it aside because it hasn’t jelled. Every now and again, I figure out a problem and get some writing done, but after … More When Lack of Sympathy is a Good Thing
Lots of writers work faster than I do. Plenty of my Facebook friends will regularly post one or two thousand words a day, and they’ll do this day after day. In fact, Stephen King thinks people are serious slackers if they don’t get three to five thousand words down. I’m just excited that I’ve finally … More 23,333 Words
Stories are fluid things until they’re typeset. That’s when most tinkering stops except for minor word tweaks and punctuation fixes. The Monday before Thanksgiving I finished Calyn’s story again and sent it off to my agent. My hope is that I’ll get a chance to finish it three or four more times with an editor … More Finished Again
I was one of the writers who shared a few techniques in Sue Bradford Edwards article, “How to Avoid Parenting Your Characters.” It was the lead piece in the 11/1 WRITER’S DIGEST e-mail newsletter. Congratulations, Sue!
Thousands upon thousands of writers are gearing up for National Novel Writing Month where the goal is to produce at least 50,000 words of a first draft. It’s described as Thirty days and nights of literary abandon. I won’t be joining them. And it’s not just because I’m in the middle of finishing the latest round of revisions to Calyn’s … More Saying “No” to NaNoWriMo
I’ve been collecting quotes from writers and editors for the past 18 years or so. In fact, I just delivered a talk at the Michigan SCBWI’s fall conference on Mackinac Island that shared the quotes that I’ve been collecting for the past 18 years. I had about two pages worth of them from various events … More Some thoughts on writing from Donna Jo Napoli
Some of my agency sibs are annoyingly astonishingly prolific. They add thousands of words a day and post totals on Facebook. I cheer in their comments section because I am honestly delighted that their words are piling up. But there is that grumpy little envious corner of my brain that’s jealous, jealous, jealous even though I understand that … More Writing A Thousand Words A Day?
As I might have mentioned before, one of the tricky things about writing in the suspense/mystery/thriller genre is ensuring that your characters aren’t too dumb to live. There has to be a reason for them to keep their deadly secrets or roam through dangerous places. In fact, there was one series of books by a mystery … More Characters Who Are Too Dumb to Live
Kristin Wolden Nitz 