Writing Advice

If you’d like to nominate your own page or query for a public critique, kindly post them here in our discussion forums: Also, if you’d like to test your editing chops, keep your eye on this area or this area! I’ll post the pages and queries a few days before a critique so you can see how your redline […]

Once you’re finished writing a first draft, self-editing a novel is one of the absolute most important things you will do as a writer. Nearly anyone can write a first draft. Very few possess the clarity, discipline, and intestinal fortitude to make the decisions necessary to turn a mediocre first stab into an incredible novel. […]

The narrative voice in a novel is a strange beast indeed. It blends a character’s conscious thoughts, their observations and physical surroundings (which a person in real life might not stop and think about), and contextualizing detail that helps orient the reader. It’s weird. It’s not like anything else that exists in the world. When […]

People do not tend to look at a surgeon performing open heart surgery and say, “I could do that!” They do not see an NBA player swish a contested three-pointer and say, “Pssh. The problem with today’s society is that there aren’t any good NBA players.” But they will pick up a bestseller in a […]

One of the most fundamental principles for writing a novel is that characters need to want something and they need to actively go after that thing. In genre fiction, this is often either self-evident (the character needs to defeat the dragon or solve the crime) or translated into something very concrete. It’s fine to simply […]

Over the last seven years I’ve embarked on a wholesale transformation of my entire life. Back in 2010, I left the book world behind to pursue a more corporate existence. Within just five years, in 2015, I had somehow ascended from being CNET’s first social media manager to running a recruiting program for the world’s […]