Five Short Steps to the Reject Pile
(Originally published in the Dec 2004 issue of Writer’s Digest and reprinted by WD in its 2005 Writer’s Yearbook Extra) Often we like to imagine the (probably imaginary) good old days when editors searched for traces of gold in the…
Recent interview on a book blog…
Texts and Teas
Writing Backward and Forward
Recently, I’ve had two clients with MFA degrees who wrote very nicely but were both having trouble with their novels’ plots. Just to make sure we were talking about the same thing, I asked each of them to define what…
On the streets of New York…
Especially on the streets of New York, where most people walk rather than drive, you’re constantly rubbing shoulders with complete strangers and being bombarded with snippets from conversations whose starting points and destinations you will never know. I heard a…
