The Best of the Best Advice

There’s a lot of advice for writers out there, and though most of it boils down to write – revise – revise again, somehow this instruction never gets old.  Most writers I know own at least a half dozen books on writing, and I think it’s because we all wish there were rules we could [...]

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Write Drunk, Edit Sober

In anticipation of the paperback release of my latest novel, Bird in Hand, my friend Gretchen Rubin invited me to answer some questions about happiness for her wonderful blog, The Happiness Project.  One of her questions is, “Is there a happiness mantra or motto you’ve found very helpful?” I do have one — which I’ll [...]

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Get Inspired!

Recently I shared some exercises I use with my students at Fordham for revising fiction and narrative nonfiction.  But a lot of us need inspiration at the other end of the process, too — right at the beginning.  So below are some of the best writing prompts I’ve used over the years.  Some I made [...]

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Revising Nonfiction

Sometimes when you’re revising it helps to have a specific assignment.   Last week in this space I listed some exercises that my fiction-writing students find useful.  Here are some revision ideas that my memoir and journalism students particularly like: 1) Write down three adjectives (beautiful, aggressive, haughty) that describe a character in your narrative/memoir. (Be [...]

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Five Ways to Jumpstart a Revision

This week I’m working on revising fiction with my undergraduate and grad students at Fordham. Below are some of the tips and ideas I’ve collected over the years that my students find most useful. (Next week I’ll talk in this space about the best exercises I’ve found for revising nonfiction.) 1) First, answer these questions: [...]

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How To Write a Screenplay in 10 Days

A-list Hollywood screenwriter Kristen Buckley (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, 102 Dalmations) tells you all you need to know about writing a successful screenplay: When people talk about fiction they usually mean novels and short stories, but a screenplay is also fiction.  It’s fiction with labyrinth-like structural constraints. Within these parameters, however, [...]

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Writing Tip #11: Don’t Listen to Hackneyed Advice

Write what you know?  On second thought … “Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words ‘Write what you know’ is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don’t. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you [...]

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Let’s Talk About Dialogue

Last month I received an early copy of Dawn Raffel’s new story collection, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, which officially debuts this week.  Reading it — a slim, spare set of 21 stories in just over 100 pages that Publishers Weekly calls “a model of economy and grace” — I was struck by how [...]

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New Year’s Resolution: Write that Book! (12 Great Tips)

Just in time for the new year, the fabulous C. M. Mayo shares her strategies for writing – and finishing – your book: Last spring my latest novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, was published. This was not a go-to-the-cabin-by-the-lake-and-churn-it-out kind of experience.  No, my novel is a nearly 500-page historical epic based [...]

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Break the Block in Five Minutes

Award-winning writer, translator, and editor C. M. Mayo explains the power of the five-minute exercise: “I don’t have time to write.”  Everyone and their uncle who has that bodacious idea for a screenplay, it seems, leans on this one.  Do you? I’m a writer, but that doesn’t mean I always have the time I’d like for writing – [...]

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Thirteen Tips for Actually Getting Some Writing Done

Gretchen Rubin is the guru behind the phenomenally successful blog (and soon-to-be book) The Happiness Project.  In this post she shares an inside glimpse at her process. One of the challenges of writing is … writing. Here are some tips that I’ve found most useful for myself, for actually getting words onto the page. 1. [...]

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Writing Tip #10: Contain Your Ambivalence

Words of wisdom from renowned book editor and literary agent Betsy Lerner: “For most writers, writing is a love-hate affair. But for the ambivalent writer who cannot attempt, sustain, or complete a piece of writing, the ambivalence usually shifts back and forth from the writing to the self. The inner monologue drums: I am great. [...]

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Writing Tip #9: Beg, Borrow, and Steal

At the Globe Theatre in London last week, a professor from Rosehampton University gave a short lecture about Romeo and Juliet before the production began.  In discussing the origins of the play the professor said, as an aside, “Of course, as we all know, Shakespeare didn’t invent anything.  All of his plays were based on [...]

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Writing Tip #8: Everything Old is New Again

Last night, reading Anthony Doerr’s lovely essay, “Butterflies on a Wheel,” in a recent issue of Granta, I came across this line: “The brain contains, always, two opposing desires: the urge to stay and the urge to run.” I read it again. The urge to stay and the urge to run. The phrase echoed in [...]

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Writing Tip #7: Embrace your Dark Side

You never know where you’ll find inspiration – or where inspiration will find you. Sitting on an airplane in the summer of 2005, on the way to Fargo, North Dakota with my family to visit my husband’s mother, I came across an interview with the novelist Sue Grafton in Northwest Airlines World Traveler magazine, of [...]

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Writing Tip # 6: Mine Your Own Material

“For me, almost everything starts off as a short story,” the novelist and short story writer Joe Meno says in the June 30th issue of One Story magazine.  “All of my novels have been built around material that’s been explored or published as short stories, because it forces me to get to the character and [...]

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Writing Tip #5: Advice from George Orwell

In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell made a list of six rules for writers. “These rules sound elementary,” Orwell wrote, “and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable.” Though he compiled this list in [...]

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More Monkey Business

A writer friend, Cindy Handler, asks: “A few posts back [Writing Tip #3: Use a Monkeywrench] you mentioned that you like to give your characters a trait that goes counter to their basic nature and makes it harder for them to get what they want (if I understand correctly).  Could you give an example?  The [...]

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Writing Tip #4: Advice from Kurt Vonnegut

“Make [your] characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”

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Writing Tip #3: Use a Monkey Wrench

When I’m developing a new character I often throw a monkey wrench into the works to create internal tension.  I give this person a trait (an obsession, a habit, a fixation, a physical peculiarity or mannerism) that seems to cut against the grain of his or her personality.  I find that these contradictions usually add [...]

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Writing Tip #2: Four Basic Elements

A novelist friend has an index card with these four words on it taped to the wall above the computer in his study: CHARACTER CONFLICT CHOICES CONSEQUENCES Sometimes it helps to remember: it’s that simple.

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Writing Tip #1: Use the Five Senses Right Away

The problem of beginning … The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a story (or a chapter or a scene) you should use all five sentences right at the start, [...]

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