Archive

I’ve received a few questions about whether or not I revise by hand, cut and paste on the computer, use Pages or Word or Scrivener, etc. when drafting the novel. Today, I thought I’d [...]

I’m home after 11 events in 4 weeks, from Alaska to Illinois to South Dakota. I’m determined to stay on track with the novel and, in that vein, I’d like to continue my series of [...]

Please join me in person or in support through social media this coming Sunday, March 23 through Tuesday, March 25th for the 38th annual Great Plains Writers’ Conference. I’m very [...]

Please join me this week, March 16-21, for Story Week Festival of Writers 2014 sponsored by the Columbia College of Chicago Fiction Department. It’s dynamic, free, and open to the public [...]

Two weeks of conference and touring: from the 17th floor of a hotel in Seattle to the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska and then some, The Writing Life is back on the blog and ready to re-cap. This is as [...]

Last night I flew to Seattle to attend the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, otherwise known as AWP. Take about 8,000 writers who are used to (and typically [...]

The reverse outlining is complete. I’ve got my scenes all cut up on little strips of paper and tucked into a plain business envelope to make sure I don’t lose any as I gear up for [...]

Well, the time has finally come. All my grandparents had them, both my parents have had them my entire lives, all my uncles and aunts have them as well. A whopping $386 later, I’ve now [...]

In addition to reverse outlining, this week I focused on making simple maps of how my characters are connected to one another and how they move across the map of the fictional village of Imar in [...]

Apparently this thing I’ve been doing has a name: reverse outlining. I write and write and write, then I go back and try to make a map of what I’ve done. The map is often only [...]