This essay was inspired by, and is based on, a discussion with the novelist and teacher Lee Martin at the Vermont College of Fine Art’s 2016 Postgraduate Writers Conference, directed...

If you are lucky, every now and then you get a light bulb moment while writing. Suddenly the murky waters clear, and you can see clearly what you are trying...

We’re often told that the secret to making writing clear and accessible is to use active verbs, simple words and short sentences. There’s something in that advice. But what really...

It is said that you can tell whether a book is going to be any good after the first eight or nine pages. And I have to agree you usually...

Stephen King has said that ‘locale and texture are much more important to the reader’s sense of actually being in the story than any physical description of the players,’ and...

My first pair of glasses are National Health issue, blue plastic, with lenses that rub the bridge of my nose. The optician adjusts them. They smell funny. ‘Lovely,’ he says,...

The difference between ‘show’ and ‘tell’ was one of the first things I had to learn when I started writing fiction. Like many writers, I fell into the early trap...

Romance novels rake in well over a billion dollars every year. Probably more so than in any other genre, readers are looking for stories in which a character’s emotions are...

I love reading books that transport me to another place—a country I’ve never been to, a city I once lived in, or a beach, mountain or stretch of countryside that...

“It is a great blessing, perhaps the greatest blessing a writer can have, to find at home what others have to go elsewhere seeking, “Flannery O’Connor The older I get...