For the Christmas holidays I had it all planned. I would write a lot. I would read a couple of novels I had set apart for the occasion. Also, I would go trail running. I only had to count down the days… Then something happened. My back began to ache. Thank god the pain wasn’t excruciating. However it was intense and insistent enough to disrupt all my plans. I could only sit for short spells of time and even then, to say I was uncomfortable would be an understatement ..read more

The Sunset Teachings. This title has a zen-like ring to it. However, I do believe sunsets are among the most important treasures the human kind can enjoy. In fact, while they can be mind-blowing, inspiring, even soul lifting, they don’t give a damn about the way we think of them. Actually, they don’t give a damn even about whether or not we humans are still here to look at them. They just are ..read more

Can you trust your instinct? This is a tough question. Especially because, even if it’s not always the case, we tend to think we know ourselves better than anyone else, don’t we? So, let me start with a story that’s based on real facts, though I’ve adapted it to make it shorter and neater. The gifted musician Once upon a time, when I was a child, I had a friend who could play the trumpet like he was born with it attached to his lips ..read more

Nowadays we spend long hours online. Both because of our job and for merely entertaining activities. However, in the long run, this being constantly connected can be harmful both for our health and our creativity. Experts call it internet addiction. For example, long periods of sitting in front of a computer can lead to postural problems and overweight. Constant online surfing can also make us more anxious, and dissatisfied with life in general ..read more

Good style is like hot air for a balloon. It may well be invisible, but it’s what keeps the damn thing up in the sky. The first line of your story is important not only for your readers. The first line of your story is especially important also for you, the writer — especially if you are a pantster. I’m saying this because first phrases, can have a unique way to set the tone and the direction of your stories ..read more

Before a genre hopping writer I was a genre hopping reader. When I was six I bought my first manga book. Its pages were large but the book itself was thin in terms of pages. Besides, on each page it showed large drawings and only one meager column of text. As a result, in an hour or so I read it from cover to cover. Then for a lack of better options I started over reading the book, and by the day after I had reread it many times ..read more

The most important thing for a beginning writer is that of discovering who he really is. At first blush this might look like a selfish thing to do. Instead it’s the opposite. In fact, the more you know yourself, the more you know how to apply the rules of writing to your work. You take what you like and are comfortable with, and toss out, adapt, or reinvent everything else. I mean, if you write he go into the shop because you’ve decided to ditch the “es” for the singular third person, I can choose not to read your book because your departure from the norm I don’t like, or don’t feel comfortab ..read more

Writing is a double edged sword for several reasons. In fact even if that of writer can be a gratifying profession, there will always be some writers complaining about how difficult and mind-wrecking writing can be. Indeed, as a bunch, writers tend to suffer from formidable bouts of procrastination — that illness of the mind that makes you prefer scrubbing clean the kitchen floor to sitting at your desk and writing. In addition, it’s all but a rare occurrence that of a writer lost in those interior waste lands where next to no new ideas grow, and those few that do never find their way into a ..read more

As I wrote in a previous post, I believe every writer would benefit from note taking. However, it’s also undeniable that you can have too much of a good thing. In fact if you take notes for just about everything you come across and find even slightly interesting, you would end up literally swimming in a sea of loosen notes, post-its, and notepads. If you had endless stamina and time at your disposal you could dive into this sea and go fishing for tasty literary preys ..read more

Every writer who’s been producing words for at least a little while knows that lexico-grammatical rules are never to be considered absolute truths. In fact, creative writing is such a complex and nuanced activity it would be naive to believe it’s possible to straitjacket it into perfectly defined boundaries. However, how to books, even those advertising an infallible method to write the bestselling novel of the century, aren’t the worst — and they’re not by a wide margin ..read more