How characters work in the machinery of the novel.

How and why your characters and plot should work together to create a book that readers can’t put down.

How visualizing your readers can help you embrace your creative power and overcome writer’s block.

Why crafting believable, engaging characters is central to writing a successful novel.

What is genre and how can understanding it help you tell the story you want to tell?

Learn how to tackle the first big step of revising your novel: choosing a tool that will help you get an overview of your story.

What’s stopping you from revising your novel?

Many times, when writers think they are revising, they are actually just editing. What’s the difference between the two?

What metaphors can help us understand the purpose and process of revising a book?

John Gardner’s Art of Fiction is misogynist and dated, but here are four pieces of wisdom worth retaining.

A review of the newest edition of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction, the standard text used in many creative writing programs.

What can this classic study of the novel teach twenty-first century writers?

A review of Anne Lamott’s generous and encouraging guide to writing, Bird by Bird.

You’ve agreed to be a beta reader for someone’s book – what do you do now? This post will give you concrete guidance on how to provide constructive criticism that will help the author improve their book.

Working with beta readers can be a low-cost way of improving your book and making sure it connects with readers in your genre. This post will give you tips on how to find beta readers, what questions to ask them, and how to use their feedback.

Writing a book is a big undertaking. Brilliant ideas can take seconds to formulate and months of labor to bring to fruition. But once you find your path, the work of hauling yourself over the mountain of the first draft simply requires putting one foot in front of the other.

I frequently counsel writers who are stuck in the early stages of book planning because they are paralyzed by anxiety that their plot or premise has already been written before – and better – by another author. I’m here to tell you what I tell them: stop worrying because the devil is in the details.

Is it “alright” or “all right”? The short answer: it depends. I’ll give you the details, so you can decide what is right for your context.

For authors, the editing process can seem mysterious and maybe even scary. What is an editor going to be doing to the words you worked so hard to get down on the page?

Learn how to bring your fictional dialogue to life using dialogue tags.