Category: Writing Advice – Craft & Process

My birthday is the 18th of March. The anniversary of my father’s death is the 19th of March. This one-two punch often catches me off-guard, a double-whammy of anxiety and guilt that throws me off my game despite my belief that I’m feeling fine. As mentioned in the authors note for this week’s Saturday Morning Story, I honestly figured this would be the first time in thirty-eight weeks where I could not produce and post a story for my patrons. Then Vulture did an article on Kelly Link, and I decided to spend Friday hustling to get a new story done. My biggest influences have always been short fiction writers, and Kelly Link rates up there as one of the biggest. Stranger Things Happen and Magic For Beginners are two of my favourite collections ever, and half the reason I attended Clarion South in 2007 was the chance to get taught by Kelly. In a lot of ways, her work

One of my favourite pages from Raymond Chandler’s notebooks, where he plans out a list of similes and descriptions that will later find their way into books. There’s similar lists scattered through the notebooks where he describes outfits, makes a note of potential titles, or golden comebacks for his dialogue. Once used, he’d go back and make a note on each list, so he wouldn’t repeat it in a later story or book. It’s easy to forget that writing is a multi-stage process involving ideation, actually putting the raw components of plot on the page, then layering in details like voice and tone that make the work unique. Often, writers approach this as a single task, sitting down at the keyboard and hammering words until a scene feels right. Reading through Chandler’s notebooks and realising you didn’t have to do all three at the same time was a revelation for me as a young writer.

This morning I’m pondering the right first move to bed into my daily routine. Right now, I have about four first moves that will kick of my day, depending on which groove I’m in:  Getting up and journaling to park ideas;  Getting up and writing directly into the computer;  Getting up and doing the day’s Worlde, then posting it to my family chat;  Getting up and brain dumping my top-of-mind thoughts into an Omnifocus inbox, then doing a project review and building my diary for the day. Of the four, Wordle is the worst option. Logging in to finish a Worlde puzzle only takes about three minutes, but it puts me in a social mindset because the next step is going into chat, and from there it’s a short skip to spending the entire morning answering email and tooling around on social media. Journaling is probably my favourite kick-off, but the chain of events that follow that meditative writing often

My desk is a disaster zone at the moment. A jagged landscape of poorly stacked notebooks, contracts, and opened mail, with the detritus of my BWF office placed over the top. I love working at my desktop, but I can’t fathom the notion of sitting down and writing there. Our kitchen is a disaster zone at the moment, too. So is our bathroom, our living room, and my car. Our bedroom is relatively well-composed, although I’m behind on cleaning the CPAP machine and that’s taking a toll on my sleep.  Other disasters: my writing process, my publishing timeline, my PhD deadlines, my planning systems. Invisible chaos that’s largely unnoticeable unless you’re inside my head and trying to wade through the detritus in order to get things done. The great temptation of chaos is this: nothing is fixable unless everything is flexible, and if you let things slide long enough, the very notion of getting ‘caught up’ is the stuff of

Elizabeth George writes a journal for every novel, logging thoughts, ideas, and problems before she starts her writing day. Every day, she runs through the same pattern: read an entry from an old journal from previous novels, then write a new entry about the book she’s currently working on. This habit gives her the scope to recognise that whatever she’s experiencing right now, she’s experienced it in the past and worked her way through. Problems got solved, and books got written.  There are damn few problems in writing sufficiently new that I’ve got no experience in figuring out how to battle through. The problem is never solutions — it’s registering the problem is in play and certain solutions are entirely within my control, even if they’re difficult to implement. Having looked through my calendar yesterday and recognised, yes, I was definitely not in a good place, I then ran through the checklist of things I know will help after a

Some weeks, everything works smoothly. You stick to your routine, your projects progress smoothly, your business runs like clockwork and delivers, just as it should.  Some weeks, everything is chaos. Work demands sudden and necessary stretches of overtime that throw your routine into chaos, just as deadlines come due on other projects, and your support team disappears because of personal tragedy, injury, or illness.  You set your default expectation of “how much writing I can do” by one of these two situations, but it will serve you poorly when the other situation is in play. There is something to be said for surveying the landscape and resetting your expectations based on the now, rather than the normal. 

Most days, I’m faking it here on the blog. My mission statement is simple—show up every day and put the most interesting insight I have into the world—but at least half the time I show up searching for something to be interested in or something useful to say. Some days, I’m less interested and more anxious or completely fucking batty or so burnt out it’s crazy. The blog is a mask I wear for a while, a better version of myself that exists for public consumption, discarded the moment I hit post. Some days, the act of posting lets me step into that better version of myself and stay there for the next eight hours. A bad day turns good by the simple virtue of roleplaying a different version of myself. My own personal magic trick, pushing me to get out of my head and engage with the world, after which I’m ready to do more. The value of faking

Avengers: Endgame is a thoroughly unsatisfying movie as a stand-alone piece of cinema, but full of heart-in-your-throat payoffs if you’ve invested in the 22 Marvel movies released over the eleven years prior to its release.   The Witcher on Netflix never really grabbed me on an episode-by-episode level, but it became remarkable when I we finished the season and pulled all the disparate narrative strands and timelines together.   Trying to engage with either of these works as a stand-alone is to read against the grain. The creators are playing by a fresh set of narrative expectations, once that started with home-video and repeated viewings. They’re film and TV of the binge-watch era, with narrative payoffs no longer confined to a singular arc or instalment. Their ambition is far-reaching and long-term.   And now, with Spiderman: No Way Home in 2021, the ambitions are more audacious. Marvel lays claim to two prior iterations of the character, bringing in actors and

Every December, around this time, my blog goes a little crazy as folks discover the What Writers Out To Know About Die Hard series of posts and start asking particularly sensible questions like, “wait, we’re only halfway through, were’s the rest of the series?” and “so you’re going to finish writing this, right?” And much as I always nod and promise I’ll get back to it one day, the odds of it making it to the top of my to-do list have always been low for a couple of complex reasons, most of which I fell into the habit of not talking about in public. So, with that in mind, here’s the current state of play: I wrote these back in 2013/2014, when I wasn’t in the best of physical or emotional health. They were powered by a clinging-on-by-the-skin-of-my-teeth energy that fueled all my writing at the time, trying to bang things out before my sleep condition left me falling