10 comments Excellent advice on doing favors for fellow writers from Robin Black: There are only so many manuscripts you can read for free before you begin to resent […]
10 comments 
The Okanagan Valley where I grew up is blessed with an array of colorful place names, including names derived from the Salish language of the original […]
Start With A Place Name
3 comments I’m going to let you in on a little secret: you write much more than you realize. Most of us write a ton of email […]
Writing is Writing is Writing
Stories are powerful tools for creating empathy. Let’s look at the idea of “writing empathy” as an inroad into story ideas. Think about a time […]
Writing Empathy
When a character has surgery on TV, you know how the prep nurse always drapes them in sheets first so that only the area being […]
Rewriting With The Surgical Drape Technique
“Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn’t know that I was supposed to be on the side of […]
Chinua Achebe: The Danger of Not Having Your Own Stories
At the very end, I read [Shonda Rimes] an audience question that said something like, “How do you think your shows have changed the position […]
Beyond The Only One
5 comments We need the books that affect us like disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being […]
The Axe for the Frozen Sea Inside Us
6 comments The invention of bouts-rimés is attributed to a minor French poet of the 17th century named Dulot, of whom little else is remembered. (At least […]