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When what you are writing is poor

If you are a good writer, and you know what good writ­ing is, one of the very hard aspects of writ­ing is know­ing that what you are cur­rent­ly writ­ing is poor. That may seem like a con­tra­dic­tion. Nev­er­the­less, it is not. To write is hard enough. To write well is that much hard­er. Since, in

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Vacation

Alex­is, from Madi­son NJ, asks, “How [do you] spend your sum­mers? The rea­son I am ask­ing this is because I want to know if authors go on vaca­tion.” I cer­tain­ly know authors who go on vaca­tion. I have tak­en them myself. I have to admit I am not so sure I like tak­ing vaca­tions. Even

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Time sequencing

A book that I thought was done came back from my publisher’s copy edi­tor. There were the usu­al cor­rec­tions; com­mas, con­trac­tions, word rep­e­ti­tions, inept gram­mar, and the occa­sion­al inter­nal con­fu­sion. There was also some­thing very much more seri­ous: I had messed up the plot’s time sequence. Ordi­nar­i­ly that might not mat­ter so much, but in

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Reading from my work

Over the many years I have giv­en my share (and then some) of speech­es, and talks to con­fer­ences, and var­i­ous gath­er­ings. Many writ­ers do this sim­ply because they are asked to do so. It’s part of the plea­sure and busi­ness of writ­ing, mak­ing your work, and your­self known. The truth is, the pri­ma­ry sub­ject of such

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Mentally digging in

I have been work­ing on a new nov­el, with a nag­ging sense that it was not going well. Although I went over it any num­ber of times, I could not fig­ure out what was wrong. The per­fect moment to ask some­one else to read it and give a cri­tique. That I did, and what came

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Visiting classrooms

It used to be that I spent a fair amount of time vis­it­ing schools, in class­rooms. I still do some vis­its but most of my vis­it­ing is now done via Skype. In this school year I’ve already done forty such vis­its, and the term is not yet over. Con­sid­er­ing where I live, high (as in Rocky

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Making a big change

One of the hard­est aspects of writ­ing occurs when your first impor­tant read­er, and/or your edi­tor, says, “Okay, but you need to make major changes.” Some­times, that admo­ni­tion comes with a spe­cif­ic sug­ges­tion, as in, “I think you need to show why ….” Or “Maybe you want to add anoth­er char­ac­ter.” If you agree—and that’s

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The tale of my first book

Justin, from Fres­no writes, “What was your first book and how did it get writ­ten?” When my eldest son, Shaun, was three, we had a fair­ly famil­iar bed­time prac­tice. He would get on my lap, and ask me to tell him a sto­ry. I would ask what the sto­ry should be about. He would try

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What the novel needs

“With all your expe­ri­ence writ­ing,” some­one asked me, “and if your new nov­el is going bad­ly, do you always know what to do?” The short answer is no. More­over, I would sug­gest, if the work is not going well, you do not need to know what to do. You need to know what the nov­el needs.

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Comprehending the language of writing

One of the rea­sons read­ing and writ­ing is so dif­fi­cult to teach in today’s schools is because it is not com­mon­ly under­stood that writ­ing is a unique form of the Eng­lish lan­guage. It is, in gen­er­al, dif­fer­ent from the way Eng­lish is spo­ken. It is often dif­fer­ent from the var­i­ous ways Eng­lish is spo­ken, in

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