Over the years, the elements of writing that I've had to focus on during revisions has changed. When I first started writing, clarity wa...

I have been resisting the lure of the shiny new iPad thingie, because the last thing I want is another expensive toy to drag around all day ...

Y'day, Scott talked about his new strategy to slow down time at critical points in his story. I got home from work, excited to slow dow...

Not long ago I believed that if you couldn't sum up your novel in one sentence, you were doomed. If you couldn't do that, you didn...

For a very long time in the history of the novel, writers have tended to produce what theorists call "ideal texts," which means th...

Alliteration is a technique that has always been a mystery to me. It's the term used to describe phrases or sentences that repeat partic...

I remember intensely studying Banana Yoshimoto's novella Kitchen and trying to figure out why her story was so unputdownable. The plot...

Lately, I've been encountering two types of flawed stories. In one type, the contents of the story are great, but the emotion in them fe...

Here is a chart showing the chapter-by-chapter wordcounts of my novel "Cocke & Bull": Here is a chart showing the chapter-...

I have been working on the first draft of a novel for the last couple of months. If I really push, I'm pretty sure I can finish by the e...

Do you know Mark Rothko? He was an abstract expressionist painter who spent much of his time painting very large canvases with rectangles of...

Here's an amusing (if you're me, which I'll grant that in all likelihood you are not) story: About three years ago, I got the id...

I decided to write this post because of what Scott wrote yesterday about his narrative proofs , which I found quite fascinating. His strateg...

I have been working on a new story idea lately, and as I push concepts around to see if I can actually make a story out of my idea, I have c...

One of the cool things about the software we use to track visitor statistics for the Literary Lab is the ability to see what search terms we...

First: Happy belated Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates that holiday (and to those who don't anyway). Mighty Reader and I had turke...

There are a couple of cliches that get thrown at writers all the time, one of the most common being "write what you know." It'...

I was going to do a sort of follow up to my poll from last week about protagonists, and tie that in with Davin's recent discussion of si...

If you are basing your novel in any way on the traditional three-act structure, I think there are certain things you should think about when...

Lois Moss had a post yesterday about music and the positive effect it has on her while writing. Making off with that idea of hers, I am thi...