“…spent years running from the prince who bound her into his service.” “…a runaway queen and a reluctant prince are thrown together on a quest…” “…as her kingdom barrels toward destruction…” “…King…

This corner of my living room has become one of my favorites. It had been so dark there at night, and I remembered this little lamp and brought it out of the basement to help illuminate the paintin…

There’s been a palpable feeling here on WU through the opening weeks of 2026. Behind many of the posts and comments I’m sensing alarm and outrage, disappointment and sadness over the state of the w…

I’m writing this off the cuff, after ICE just murdered someone else in Minneapolis in cold blood. Right now, the information is sparse: we don’t know his...

This post may appear to have little to do with the craft or business of writing, but the lived experience of what I suspect to be a great many of us creative types deserves attention, too. Kelsey A…

Every New Year I send out cards to former clients to find out how they’re doing and remind them that someone out there remembers they’re writers and wants to see them keep writing.  I think t…

Titles matter. That’s why a good title is so important.  However, unlike Tolstoy’s famous (and incorrect) declaration about happy families, all good titles are not alike. There are many effective t…

Among the many powerful things I’ve read recently, the one that struck deepest as a writer of fiction came from Robert Stone’s piece in Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel…

Unfortunately, in word count as in life, there is no magic number. This applies both to the overall number of words in your manuscript (How many does it take? Enough to tell the story) and the dail…

I’ve spent the past two months—that’s not an exaggeration—working on three pages of my novel. I’m in the revision stage, and the pages I’m wrestling with are the first three pages of the book and e…

The other day, while sharing pages with my critique group, I had a scene where a character finds a camera loaded with film in her dead friend’s apartment. The response from my crit partners: “Oooh,…

The other morning at my desk, fifty pages into writing a new novel, I found myself inventing a scene set in Central Park in the mid-1980s, a time when I had lived in New York with my boyfriend (now…

[Note: This post is occasioned in part by a discussion of “what to write now” begun here in January by Rachel Toalson and David Corbett.] Last month I suggested that any work of fiction has one of …

Are you burned out? We live in an age of hyper-productivity. If you’re not doing a million things (presumably well) you are somehow failing. The only acceptable excuse for lack of productivity is “…