The Write Blog

Hemingway made sure he wrote no less than 500 words a day, every day.  Faulkner always drank whiskey when he wrote, while Balzac is known to have sometimes consumed more than ten cups of espresso per day while he was working.  Thomas Wolfe allegedly prefers to write while standing up.  Getting sloshed while working may [...]

The key to good fiction is giving your readers a reason to keep going – little mysteries and mini-conflicts that add suspense and create tension. After all, if you feel like you know everything about a character in the first few pages, is there any real reason to waste time finding out what will happen [...]

Even the world’s greatest musicians practice daily and spend time warming up before every single performance.  As a writer, you, too, need to work your creative muscles with some exercises designed to challenge your creativity, stretch your limits, and rev your writing engine.  Spend no more than ten minutes on each of these prompts.  Set [...]

As a writer, you can’t always blame writer’s block for the blank page that’s staring back at you. And darn that stupid blinking cursor, taunting you as it reminds you over and over again that there’s still nothing on your page. As seemingly fun as it is to waste time instead of delving right into [...]

There is a lot to be said of brevity. Shakespeare wrote somewhat ironically through the mouthpiece of the long-winded Polonius in Hamlet that “brevity is the soul of wit.” And William Strunk reminds us in the Elements of Style that “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same [...]