I am writing more often on Substack these days. You can go there to read those things (there’s a gradually-growing collection of stuff at our Substack, Write Well & Publish Wisely), or you could download the Substack app to your phone and read our stuff there as a Substack native. Or you could just subscribe […]
“How do I get good endorsements for my debut novel?”
The best part of my job as a writing coach and editor is the opportunity to mentor aspiring authors. A significant amount of my time with aspiring authors ends up on an invoice, but not all of it, not by a long shot. You are probably already familiar with the Wordsmith Writing Coaches “less-than-15-minutes-is-free” policy, […]
Why do you do it?
There are only two fundamental reasons for writing anything. It’s either therapy or impact. If you are writing for impact, you are writing primarily for others. If you are writing for therapy, you are writing primarily for yourself. Anything written specifically for impact must focus on, and can only be judged by, its intended audience and the impact […]
It takes a lot to make me angry. This did…
I write a lot of answers on Quora (I was a Top Writer in 2018, and have kept contributing since then, but Quora grew bigger and bigger and I became a smaller and smaller fish in comparison). I like answering questions that others find exasperating, trying to do justice to the curiosity behind the “dumb” […]
Micro-level story structure: The Mysterious MRU
Story Structure, Part 2: the MRU Remember that mid-level scene-by-scene story structure works best with a rhythm of Goal, Conflict, Disaster, Reaction, Dilemma, Decision. You can divide this rhythm into Scenes and Sequels, as Dwight Swain does, or you can divide them into pairs (Goal/Conflict, Disaster/Reaction, Dilemma/Decision), or you can consider them one long unified […]