Writers' craft

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts.  Read more

The following are just my personal pieces of advice. They won't be the same as someone else's, and they may not fit your life or practice, but maybe you'll pick up something useful.

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