When people ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” the answer is as simple as “Everywhere!” — and too complex to explain without boring you out of your head. To get ideas, you need to open yourself to the world, give yourself permission to follow your obsessions wherever they might lead you, no matter how…
One of the things I didn’t understand when I started my Livejournal four or five years ago was that an author blog is so much more than a way to showcase your writing or promote your books. When other people read your blog, a small number of them will leave comments, which means the reader…
So you’re an author — published or unpublished, doesn’t matter — and you’ve accepted the cold hard truth: you need a blog. Maybe you’re not exactly sure why you need a blog, only that everybody (publishers, editors, agents, your aunt, your landlord, the kid who walks your dog) says you need a blog, and you…
cross-posted to The Decadence One of the challenges for any writer is to find that balance between solitude and intimacy, independence and community. An artist – and by this I mean anyone who takes art-making seriously, whatever kind of art that may be – is by definition a rebel. The whole point of art is…
Between each fruitful phase are long periods of exploration, faltering, learning, and working things out. – Kenneth Noland In January 2009, I faltered: my creative life paralyzed by anxiety and ambivalence as the rest of my life came apart. My marriage had ended. Less than two months after he’d filed for divorce, my ex-husband announced…
I like how experienced novelist James Scott Bell puts it in his book THE ART OF WAR FOR WRITERS: Write hard, write fast, and the fire of creation will be yours. It reminds me of an exercise Rachel Resnick (LOVE JUNKIE, GO WEST YOUNG F*CKED UP CHICK) had us do in a workshop: “You have…
In my last post about author platforms I came up with the term ‘author wave’ which, to me, is more reflective of my growing understanding of what the process is. Or maybe an author wave complements an author platform. Chris Brogan talks about your platform as “a place from which to share ideas”. Literary agent…
1 Nina Sankovitch decided to read and review a book a day for an entire year — and blog about it. In this interview, she observes: “The traits of great writing are genuineness, truth, fearlessness. Say it out loud: no fear.” To tell the truth, your truth, as you understand it. Or, if you’re a…
1 I mentioned in my livejournal that I found most information on platform-building for fiction writers to be unsatisfactory, and it’s been interesting to think about why. The advice seems to be as follows: start a blog! get on Twitter! get on LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook! build a website! There’s not a lot of info on…
I am a big fan of Chris Brogan — his TRUST AGENTS is one of those books I practically hurl at people’s heads (in a good way), I recommend it so much — and although he talks about how social media and community-building applies to business, a lot of what he says applies to writers….
