Books, like quilts, require assembling many pieces.
When I visited my in-laws before Christmas, I was amazed at the progress my mother-in-law had made on her latest quilt.
When I first saw the project in July, I feared it was more than she could handle. The intricate pattern called for hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny pieces. All she had was large sections of fabric.
By Labor … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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