I’ve been working on a new novel for a while now. After two years of steady work, I completed the first draft of the manuscript in January. Since then, I’ve been spending nearly every minute of my writing time revising all three-hundred-plus pages of it line by line. I’m currently working on my fourth round of these revisions, after which I might* be happy enough with the book to send it out to beta readers. It’s been a long process, so time consuming and, at times, tedious that I began to wonder whether other writers also scrutinize each of their sentences multiple times when trying to final ..read more

As a painter who has been at it for almost a decade now, I realized recently that I’d stopped trying to imitate other painters. I’m influenced by many, all my great loves—O’Keeffe and Matisse, Turner and Constable; illustrators Sempe and Juarez– but somewhere along the line, I started interpreting the world of paint and shape in my own way. And yet, those painters and illustrators remain as my teachers, my lineage of color theory and line. Years into my publishing career, I happened to pick up Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. It’s one of my favorite novels, by one of my favorite writers. I rea ..read more

The question should’ve been easy to answer and yet it left me thinking for days. Writing this post was my way of sorting it out. I blame Terah Shelton Harris, and her thought-provoking essay here on WU earlier this month. In which she asked, “What’s your definition of success?”  In the essay, Terah describes being taken aback when she was asked whether she considered her recent debut to be a success. Evidently I can relate! In the piece, Terah reveals that she’d once thought that success would include some tangible, public accolade, such as making a list, and cites the NY Times bestseller ..read more

There are many hot takes on social media about how to write a book, what traditional publishers like, and what you need to do to make your novel a bestseller. There are some kernels of advice that are very useful, but others make you want to scratch your head and wonder where on earth they come up with that one? Below are some of my favorite myths about the publishing industry, and some truths about them. You have to have an MFA to be published by traditional publishers. While this one is new to me, it’s still fairly ridiculous. You don’t need to have an MFA, or even a writing degree for that ..read more

Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page. Here’s the question: Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents. So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those t ..read more

In her March 14th post, Polarize Your Characters, Energize Your Novel, Kathryn Craft made the following excellent observation: “[E]xtreme differences in perspective can provide what subtler conflicts cannot. The chasm that opens between your characters can expose deeply held morals and values that will make your story seem to matter more. Exploring a chasm’s many sides can give all persuasions of readers someone to relate to in your novel, even as you show the ways that each deeply held belief is relatable. A chasm allows your protagonist to fall into a deeper, darker place, allowing you to ..read more

Narcissus, staring at his reflection, from a 14th century manuscript. Kepler’s Fourth Law of Planetary Motion:  The world doesn’t revolve around you, you know.   To write well, you need to get into other people’s heads – to understand that your way of seeing the world isn’t the only way there is.  This empathy can become such a habit that you can forget that some people just can’t do it.  Either these narcissists imagine that everyone who thinks differently from them is plain wrong, or they don’t even realize there are differences. Narcissists, though, can make for good ..read more

There is a famous paradox, attributed to a fourteenth century French philosopher named Jean Buridan, about a hypothetical donkey, equally hungry and thirsty, who is placed at the exact midpoint between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Everything the donkey needs and wants is within reach—yet he dies of both hunger and thirst, since it can’t decide which way to move. (The idea actually goes back to 350 B.C., when Aristotle wrote: “A man, being just as hungry as thirsty, and placed in-between food and drink, must necessarily remain where he is and starve to death.”) In another well-know ..read more

photo adapted / Horia Varlan I am drawn to the things that people won’t talk about. That may be obvious, if you know that my first two novels were about body image and suicide. When was the last time you asked a new mom about her poochy, post-baby abdomen, or what it was like for your neighbor to find her son dead by his own hand? Body-altering, life-changing events happen to us every day that most people just won’t talk about, even though staying mum feeds a churning magma of shame. Secrets and lies are everywhere in contemporary fiction, and will often drive the entire novel, as David Corb ..read more

Please welcome back multi-published author Henriette Lazaridis as our guest today! Henriette is the author of The Clover House (a Boston Globe bestseller), Terra Nova (which the New York Times called “ingenious”), and Last Days in Plaka, which was published just yesterday, on April 9th. Last Days in Plaka is Henriette’s most personal novel to date. A first generation Greek American and only child of expat parents, Henriette grew up speaking Greek as her first language and listening to her father relay Homer’s Odyssey. It’s no wonder that she has set her latest novel in Greece or that the stor ..read more