Writers' craft

Gunfights are chaos events. They make no sense, can never make sense. They are over in seconds. The men who fight them do so guided only by instincts that may or may not reflect training and experience. What happens-no matter how unlikely-happens, without recourse to do-overs, odds and the utter whimsey of luck. There are no rules.  Read more

Sometimes a story demands more than just a plot to move its emotional content forward. When a story becomes very complicated, or a little too crowded with characters, or stretched over a long period of time, you may want to create a context. Context is the descriptive background in a story that sheds light on its meaning.  Read more

It is rare, in this day and age, to see a good tweet on the internet, but I did love this one, from New York Times writer Erin Griffith, which includes a graph she designed to depict the dramatic ups and downs of a writer's self-esteem, which are entirely dependent upon the stage of the writing/editing process they're in.  Read more

My entire childhood I hoped to write books, and entered the publishing industry after college on the now humorous assumption-humorously wrong, and also humorously correct for reasons I did not then understand-that being an editor would help me realize that dream. I became a full-fledged book editor in 2007, after the assumed unpaid internship and then editorial assistantship.  Read more

AA Dhand sits at a table in the balcony cafe at Bradford's magnificent old Wool Exchange and points to the spot where his latest victim was found.

She was hanged in a particularly grisly fashion from a ledge below the hammer-beam roof, suspended between two grand granite pillars.  Read more