At what point is your novel is done? Completed? Finished? How many revisions and edits are enough? Basically, when is enough, enough? I recently reread my own self-pubbed novel, The Days Without You, and damnit if I didn’t find another error—a missing word. Even though it was a teeny, tiny preposition that my eyes almost …
If there’s one thing that makes me angry, it’s when mental illness is written poorly in fiction. Bipolar is not just happy and sad. Schizophrenia is not multiple personalities. Over the years, people with mental illness have also been portrayed as violent. The truth is that people with mental illness are ten times more likely …
If you’re a writer, you probably have heard the phrase “Said is dead” given as writing advice. When I search that saying, I come up with hundreds of blogs that offer alternatives to the word said. (I also come up with some song on the first page of results. Interesting.) People say that this particular …
No, I don’t mean procreation when I say “creating” people—that’s a whole separate topic we’re not going to get into. Here, we’re talking about making up characters for fictional stories. What’s great about creating characters for a story is that humans are so diverse. We, as people, are so utterly interesting as a species. From …