Tag: The Writing Life
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Marketing your novel: The Query Letter
Don’t spend two years writing the Great American Novel and two weeks marketing it. It’s time to look at your novel differently: it is no longer your little baby, your creation, your Precious. It is now a product. Treat it as such; this professional mindset might help a little, when you start getting rejections. Which…
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Should You Get an MFA in Creative Writing?
Students ask whether or not they should get a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in order to become a writer and I say Absolutely not. No MFA writing program will make you a writer. Only you can do that. If you’re serious about writing, an MFA might be right for you. But, I…
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Careful, who you read your journal to…
In the middle of writing the first notes for the novel The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones, I recorded the above dream. My son Ben had been born two months previous. He was our last of four children, and my mind had focused on that—the youngest. There was a brittle feeling about it, though…
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Fiction: Outlines
Outlines can be dicey, to say the least. Here’s my first fear: if I write out an entire outline for a story, will I feel forced to stick with it, even though the narrative might be going another way? Because, if things are really grooving, and you’re in the zone for weeks at a time,…
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Fiction: Pick a Chaos, Any Chaos
Every novel needs a little chaos in it. That’s what ignites the story. The novel begins with a character or two in their regular, everyday lives (that could be anything from a pimp drinking coffee at Starbucks, to an astronaut doing her daily orbit around Mars). Then something happens to them, an event or a…