Writers' craft

When asked, Marlon James is hard-pressed to name his favorite story. It's admittedly a nearly impossible request to make of anyone, and surely more so of a novelist, whose trade relies so deeply on both intake and telling, however tangled, of tales. Unable to name just one, James improvised.  Read more

Like most authors who don't sell a million books a year, I have a day job. I've been a journalist since before personal computers. It's a fun gig that pays the bills but also a challenging one that limits time for making things up.  Read more

Barbara Kingsolver says that people often get her titles wrong. "Once a TV interviewer asked me how writing The Beans of Egypt, Maine has affected my life," she recalls. "I was able to say honestly, ‘Not at all!' " That's of course because the interviewer mistook Kingsolver's 1988 novel The Bean Trees for a novel by Carolyn Chute.  Read more

You know the feeling: you're staring at the black computer screen, blinking occasionally-staring and blinking, staring and blinking, until the cursor starts to blink back and you have to go to bed for a while. Maybe you're staring and blinking at an actual, physical blank page, in which case you should definitely go to bed for a while if it starts to blink back.  Read more

A few weeks ago I wrote the first draft of Book 12 very quickly - 80,000 words in one month. This meant it came straight from the heart and I was able to write it with a clear view of the characters and plot, without long breaks from the project meaning continuity became hard work.  Read more