I’m going to be attending Maggie Stiefvater’s Portraits and Dreams writing seminar this weekend, assuming the ARCTIC OUTBREAK doesn’t ground me in Iowa.* Here’s the workshop description, aka “why...
I’ve been thinking — and this is no way an original idea, but I’ve been thinking it anyway — about how one of the (perhaps necessary?) components of creativity is the ability to let the creative work occupy your...
Today I gave the time I usually spend writing this post to something both more urgent and more important. I’m also pretty sure I gave away the brainspace I’d have used to write it, ’cause right now I only...
Today you need to read Pulitzer-prize-winning author Paul Harding’s essay about how he created Tinkers, which is to say that I needed very much to read this essay today (it was published this morning at LitHub), and...
Okay. So on Monday I wrote about Seth Godin’s distinction between problems and boundary conditions (problems have solutions, problems with no solutions are boundary conditions you have to live with) and asked what it...
So I keep telling myself that NEXT BOOK doesn’t have to be good. I mean, obviously, I want it to be good. I’m going to try my hardest for it to be good, which is to say that I’m going to try my hardest to do...
This week is going to be a “things I’m thinking about” week, so let’s start with a recent Seth Godin blog post called Problems and Boundaries: All problems have solutions.That’s what makes them...
I told you I’d share the BIG PROBLEM at the core of NEXT BOOK, and here it is: You’ve probably figured out, if you’ve been reading carefully, that NEXT BOOK takes place in the real world, in our current...
When I wrote The Biographies of Ordinary People, I not only gave each chapter a title but specifically styled them in a way that both paid homage to previous works and told the reader what they could expect...
