Finding the right book title can feel strangely difficult, especially when you’ve lived with the manuscript for so long. My favorite strategy is to go looking for the title inside […]
Writing
How to Write Diverse Ensemble Casts Without Falling Into Stereotypes
Writing one character deeply is hard. Writing four, five, or ten characters deeply in the same book is a whole different challenge. When you’re writing characters from different racial, cultural, […]
Writing a Sequel and Pitching a Series
The moment a story grows past the borders of a single book, a whole new set of worries arrives. How much of the first book do you carry into the […]
How to Describe What Your Characters Are Wearing
I don’t usually spend a lot of time describing what my characters are wearing. Most of the time, I trust readers to fill in those blanks for themselves. But sometimes […]
When Your Manuscript Is Ready to Query
There is a particular kind of paralysis that hits writers at the threshold of querying. You have the manuscript. You have the agent list. And somewhere on your desk sits […]
Getting Unstuck When You Have No Idea What Happens Next
Every now and then, as writers, we hit a point where the story simply stops. Something has to happen next, nobody knows what it is, and the longer the cursor […]
The Long Game of a Writing Career
I’ve been doing a lot of math around this lately, thinking about what a writing career actually looks like over time. Not the big debut-novel fantasy with the six-figure advance, […]