Long-form Writing

Why Middles Go SoftThat sinking feeling hits around chapter ten. The opening landed -- sharp inciting incident, characters finding their voices, co...

The most memorable characters in fiction are not the ones writers understood best. They are the ones writers were still figuring out. That sounds ...

Stephen King once said: "Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings."...

The Cost of ChaosThree hours into a Saturday writing session and the words are flowing. A character mentions a street name from Chapter 4. Quick ch...

There's a specific breed of frustration that only hits after weeks of preparation. The one-sentence summary is done. The paragraph summary, done. C...

The worst thing that can happen to a novel isn't rejection. It's never leaving the writer's hard drive. Ninety-seven percent of people who start w...

The Physical Layer: What Your World Looks LikeMost writing advice says world-building comes first. Design the map, invent the history, codify the m...

Why Does the Snowflake Method Work?"I used to be a seat-of-the-pants writer," physicist-turned-novelist Randy Ingermanson once admitted. "Then I wr...

His Desk, His DungeonThree months into writing your novel, you've got forty pages. Good pages, even. Then life gets loud -- a deadline at work, a f...

Most writing advice tells you to start with an outline. Build the skeleton, then add the flesh. Plan your ending before you write your beginning. ...

"There is no real ending. It's just the place where you stop the story." Frank Herbert said that, and he was talking about Dune -- a novel that use...