Your characters have attitudes before your story starts. Before page one and sentence one, they already have a strong point of view about the world. More specifically, they are evaluating how the world (the life all around them) is treating them. Good or bad. It’s critical that you know what makes them tick before whatever happens in the juicy novel you’ve dreamed up. They are real people with struggles. I’ve been thinking about all this since listening to another great episode on one of my favorite podcasts, Scriptnotes. (The discussion about motivation starts at about the 27 minute mark.) Wh ..read more

This last month of writing has been about stepping back and taking a look at what I have written from a different point of view. I have been reading over what I have written, a practice I try not to do until five or six chapters in, that way I am too invested to throw the whole thing away. At this point, my work in progress is like a tiny baby bird fumbling around, doesn’t quite have its feathers yet, but I love its little naked ugliness and want to nurture and protect it. I want to see what it will become when it grows up. That means that while re-reading, I am not so much editing, but lookin ..read more

Resilience may be one of the most underrated of characteristics; as human beings it seems that the world is increasingly asking us to up our resilience game. As human beings who  also happen to be writers, resilience isn’t simply a nicety, it’s obligatory. Being a writer who lacks resilience is like being a car that lacks wheels. As the years went on, I thought that the vicissitudes of my own life would teach me how to persevere with expertise. This was especially true since I am a writer who also happens to be a psychologist, and few arenas are better at providing lessons about resilienc ..read more

Every work of fiction is fueled by some grand conflict or tension, but on the paragraph-to-paragraph level, the story gains momentum through micro-tension. Author Donald Maass states: “Micro-tension is the moment-by-moment tension that keeps the reader in a constant state of suspense over what will happen, not in the story but in the next few seconds.” Think of the Harry Potter series. All the books are propelled by the eventual confrontation of Harry and Voldemort, but along the way, the characters face a score of problems ranging from trivial (Malfoy’s public school boy bullying) to more ser ..read more

With one week left before the deadline to enter the Colorado Gold Literary Awards, we are receiving more entries every day. I’m not here to discuss procrastination (plenty of other posts have already been written about that) but rather what a writer might be doing in those final days before a deadline, be it for a contest, submission call, or one set by an agent or editor. Hopefully, its more than wallowing in self-doubt. (Plenty of posts about that, too.) One thing I find myself doing in those high-stress, last-minute situations is seeking out yet another pair of eyes to critique my work, som ..read more

For my second novel, Blindspot, I ventured into a new genre, that of psychological suspense. It’s the type of book I gravitate to as a reader and I’m a long-term fan of anything in the mystery realm (I devoured the entire Agatha Christie oeuvre when I was sixteen) How hard could it be? Insert hubris emoji here. What I quickly discovered is that every chapter—make that every scene—has to employ tension so that the reader is experiencing the same emotion my protagonist Rachel is, that of a mounting sense of  uneasiness and ultimately danger as she realizes she is being stalked by an unknown ..read more

I’ll begin with a John Dryden wrote: “If you be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams – the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.” Brevity includes the marvelous art of saying more with less. Most people appreciate writers and speakers who know how to be brief. That’s why shortcuts (or initialisms) like LOL, BTW, OMG, IDK, and IMO have become so popular. They get the point across in less time. In creative writing, wordiness (the antithesis of brevity) occurs when the author uses two dozen words to send a message that could just as well be conveyed with much less. An ..read more

Success is dying knowing you did your best every single day. I have these words taped to the front of my planner which means I read them 3 to 5 times every single day. Every time I read it, it resonates deeply with me. Death is so final which is the reason that it is just so strikingly hard to deal with. We have so much living to do. Every. Day. There is some comfort, though, knowing that when it is time to move on from this world, if I spent every day in complete success then there will be an immense amount of peace. Let’s go over success, shall we? Though this is unique for everyone, one of ..read more

April is National Poetry Month. So why should that matter to fiction writers? Because poetry is the marriage of words and ideas, blending the two together to create something greater than the sum of their parts—which is exactly the same thing fiction does. Personally, I believe reading poetry (and, if you choose, writing the occasional poem, no matter how awful you think it may be) can help fiction writers hear language in new ways, play joyfully and unabashedly with words, and explore rhythms, metaphor, nuance, symbols, and imagery. In essence, when we fiction writers spend time reading or wr ..read more

When I wrote my historical novel, My Heart Lies Here, I did as much research as I could about the Ludlow Massacre in Trinidad, Colorado. The Ludlow Massacre took place in 1914 when the United Mine Workers of America organized a strike of the coal miners of John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. The strikers and their families lived in tents on the windswept prairie through the coldest winter in Colorado history, while violence escalated between strikers and mine guards. The Colorado National Guard was called in to keep peace but instead, burned the tent colony to the ground, k ..read more