Category Archives: Writing tools

Some excellent advice here: “How Writing 1000 Words a Day Changed My Life.”

From Joe Fassler and Andre Dubus III in The Atlantic: “The Case for Writing a Story Before Knowing How it Ends.”

For your thoughtful consideration, first from Miller, Leonard, Atwood, Gaiman, and Orwell, and then from Hemingway.

An excellent book review, entitled “Plots,” largely about first sentence techniques.

From Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively, here is an exercise that encourages revision as a form of composition.

Consider this excerpt from Robert Boswell’s essay “The Half-Known World” in his book The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction. Boswell says “There can be no discovery in a world where everything is known. A crucial part of the writing endeavor is the … Continue reading →

This PDF is a dramatic oversimplification, but it outlines an approach to plotting that is essential in some genres. Variations on it can be especially interesting.

From John Dufresne’s The Lie That Tells a Truth, here are some more writing commandments. And, from Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing, an additional set. Finally, Kurt Vonnegut’s eight guidelines for writing a story: Use the time of a total … Continue reading →

Talk with at least one other person in the room about these questions: What large (global, chapter-level) changes do you need to make first? Second? What worries you about your opening? Your middle? Your conclusion? How can you increase the … Continue reading →