How Not To Write

It should come as no surprise that one of my characters is a novelist. This character, Burt Thompson, is a rough, burly man. Sort of like Ernest Hemingway crossed with Hunter S. Thompson. And yes, that’s where his last name came from… Burt is the central figure in my second novel, a book called Revisions, [...]

As some of you know, I’ve been living in limbo this past year. Here and there, but mostly there… which is a fancy way of saying I haven’t been living anywhere. Some writers dream of this sort of isolation. They look at their busy lives and think about the struggle they endure trying to find [...]

“Outlining is an important part of writing, but no one ever buys anything off the NYT Bestselling Outlines list.” ~ Me A question from writer Mike Cummings spawned the little quip above. After thinking about it for quite a bit, this afternoon I figured I ought to back it up with some actual writing of [...]

No matter what you should be doing, an excuse will smooth over almost any problem. Even a bad excuse will generally get you out of trouble. Having no excuse at all is looked upon as just being lazy. If you use an excuse enough, you stop looking for reasons to use it. In fact, the [...]

I’ve never known a writer not to be needy in some way. It comes with the territory really. If you have so many ideas or dialogue or just old-fashioned words in your head that you feel compelled to put them down on paper and share them with the world, you must have some need to [...]