When I was a student in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I heard Jane Kurtz, the…
Last week, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley won the Newbery Honor Award for her middle grade novel, The War that Saved my Life, and just this…
For months I’ve been trying to find the right opening for the novel I started in 2013, and I think…
The Halfway House for Writers is a book I’ll read again. And again. And again. Like Anne Lamott’s Bird by…
Over this past summer, friends gave me these comments on the draft of a new YA novel: “I’m confused here. Are the…
I’m big on beginning novels in media res (in the middle of things), meaning jumping into a scene…
I recently read and commented on a number of submissions for Hunger Mountain, Vermont College of Fine Arts’ journal for…
What a joy to feature Wendy Wan-Long Shang on my blog today! Wendy is the author of the award-winning novel…
We live in a 45 year-old house just beyond the county utility lines, so we’ve got a septic tank out…
Today’s post is for every fiction writer with a manuscript (like mine) that isn’t quite working. I’ve hit the two-year…