Here’s a reprint of a post I published on another site in 2011. It’s aimed at my writer friends, but readers should appreciate it as well. When I ordered David Jauss’ “On Writing Fiction” (Writers Digest Books, 2011) I wasn’t confident I’d find much worthwhile. I have a basic distrust of how-to books. The last […]
Archive | Writing and Editing
My Report from the 2017 AWP Writers Conference
I attend my first Association of Writers & Writers Programs (AWP) Conference in D.C. for two days this past week. It was eye-opening, not only in terms of the information I gleaned from the five workshops I attended, but based on my observations of the scheduled workshops, the exhibitors, and the people. Despite the projected […]
Book and Writers’ Conferences: No Shortage of Opportunities
I’m scheduled for four conferences this spring. That’s a lot, but I go because I always come away with something of value. Writers’ conferences offer speakers touching on subjects of import to me as I seek to perfect my writing and reach more readers. The largest writers conference in the country is sponsored each year […]
On Writing: Let’s Look at Transitions
When switching from one scene to another or one chapter to another, the writer’s goal is to maintain the reader’s interest level or even to ramp it up from where the previous scene/chapter left off. To do that some writers, myself included, occasionally fall back on a straight narrative presentation. Here’s an example: Joe wrote […]
Why I Write Thrillers
Ten years ago when I started writing novels if you asked me what genre I planned to write, I would not have said thrillers. Yet from a dozen false starts sitting on my hard drive, I picked a thriller for the first novel I tried to complete. That became The Expendable Man, which some still […]