Writing habits

This week, I'm a guest on the Marginally podcast, which is about writing (or the creative life) when you also hold a day job. I immensely enjoyed the conversation with Olivia and Meghan, not least because it was free of the usual nuts-and-bolts of how to get published. Instead, we discussed the vexed issue of writing and money.

Whether you are an indie author struggling to get discovered, a well-known traditionally published writer, or somewhere in between, writer's block may sneak up on you once in a while-maybe even more than once in a while.

Orwell advised cutting as many words as possible, Woolf found energy in verbs, and Baldwin aimed for ‘a sentence as clean as a bone'. What can we learn from celebrated authors about the art of writing well?

Besides being a social burden I'm finding it to be a problem in my reading and writing. Facts/lines of poems/details of plot smear in my head, and often I find myself left with impressions of texts that are far too vague for me to build opinion around. Reading non-fiction or heavily referential fiction feels near pointless as things go in one ear and out the other.  Read more

Today would have been the 98th birthday of Ray Bradbury, the greatest sci-fi writer in history, who (by no small coincidence) also happened to know a thing or two about writing. Like many American children, I grew up on Bradbury-"The Veldt" remains my favorite of his stories-but as I became a writer myself I began to cherish not just the great author's work, but his attitude towards it.  Read more