5 comments Fall down seven times, stand up eight. 七転び八起き — Japanese Proverb
5 comments 
5 comments Take your [favorite] thing you’ve written. Look at the first draft. List every change that turned A into B. Make that your rewrite checklist. — […]
Turbocharge Your Rewriting
3 comments Image: Ralph Richardson and Michèle Morgan as Baines and Julie in ‘The Fallen Idol’ (1948) What is “verisimilitude”? Verisimilitude means “seeming real or life-like”; it […]
David Hare: How to make your scenes feel more real
7 comments John Thornton Williams explains a better way to “show don’t tell” how your characters are feeling: through indirection of image, or projecting their emotions onto […]
Projecting emotions
7 comments A major challenge of writing diverse characters is the burden of representation.
The challenges of writing diverse characters
“It was a fun, masochistic challenge to look at this 500-page book [Gone Girl: A Novel], and say, ‘Well, I’m going to have to lose […]
Gillian Flynn on the discipline of adaptation
The story gets to be what the story wants to be–meaning, if I’m struggling with a story, it quite likely could be that I’m trying […]
Shari Green: Listen to your story
Who are your heroes in your field? What would outdoing them look like? Are you aiming that high? How could you get there? Think of […]
Outdo your heroes
Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true […]