Characters Who Stick

What makes your cast memorable?

Saturday, I brought home a short piece of railroad track — because of a novelist.

The previous weekend, my wife and I spent time with a friend we knew because her late husband and I belonged to a book collectors’ group. As she works to find new homes for the items in his collection, she keeps discovering ones that leave her mystified.

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Read Good Books

Fill your mind with effective examples.

The past two weeks I’ve been spending six hours a day editing someone’s novel.

The author’s a solid storyteller, but his mechanics are weak. So I’m taking pains to fix the punctuation on nearly every sentence. And the dialogue attribution. And much of the spelling. Plus some of the verb tenses. I can work no more than an hour at a … Continue reading

Finishing a November Novel

Treat it as it is: a first draft.

Are you scrambling to meet your deadlines for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)? Consider again the experience of my friend Chandler Birch, who in 2013 decided to try to write a novel in a month.

The challenge gave Birch his start. “Prior to that,” he says, “I had next to no experience developing a plot bigger than … Continue reading