Benjamin Roesch

Tag: Writing Advice

  • Post #155: Retreat!

    For the past two and a half days, I’ve been in the Northeast Kingdom, in the northernmost tip of Vermont, only a stone’s throw away from the Canadian border, on a writing retreat. As usual, I’ve been quite productive, accomplishing in only a few days what normally takes me weeks,…

  • Post #152: Meet the Voice of Rainey Cobb

    First off, have you gotten your copy of Blowin’ My Mind Like a Summer Breeze yet? Click HERE to order the paperback, e-book, or audiobook! Also remember to add it on Goodreads HERE. Now…on with the program! Collaborating with voice actor Nicola Fordwood to bring the audiobook for Blowin’ My Mind Like a Summer Breeze…

  • Post #148: The Waiting is the…(say it with me!)

    First off, have you pre-ordered Blowin’ My Mind Like a Summer Breeze yet? Click HERE to pre-order your copy now–thank you! Also remember to add it on Goodreads HERE! Now, to business. After years (and years) of trying, my debut novel finally comes out next month, and I’ve been thinking…

  • Post #145: I Know a Writer Who Can Help With That

    Much like getting a golf ball to fly in the direction you intended it to go when you hit the damn thing, writing is way harder than it looks. That goes for whether you’re sweating your college admissions essay, or trying to get your novel’s opening to work a little…

  • Post #142: Control-F

    I’ve been furiously editing my debut novel for publication this summer, and let me tell you, it’s a journey. Fraught with peaks and valleys, confirmations and surprises, tears and (near) laughter. It’s also a supreme brain challenge, applying the editing skills you know you have to the words that you…

  • Post #139: Ambitious Attainability

    I love some good goal setting just as much as the next guy. After all, setting goals + achieving goals = happier self. And who doesn’t want to be happier? But I’ve also developed a bit of an algorithm for my own goals, whether they be for my writing life…

  • Post #137: Book Title Bingo

    For me, choosing a book title is one of the hardest parts of the writing process. And by hardest, I mean it makes me want to jump out my office window into oncoming traffic. The problem, generally, isn’t generating ideas. Usually, the ideas are the easy part. It’s deciding which…

  • Post #128: Some Thoughts on Ann Patchett

                In Ann Patchett’s 2011 novel State of Wonder, she demonstrates how a writer can, and should, manipulate time to inform a reader’s experience and focus her attention. In a rudimentary sense, time = importance. By skipping briskly through time, for instance, a reader subconsciously…

  • Post #123: Well Said, Eudora Welty

    Some lovely passages from Eudora Welty’s memoir to brighten and enlighten your day… “The events in our lives happen in a sequence of time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily–perhaps not possibly–chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often…

  • Post #108: Good Medicine From the News Feed

    My relationship to Facebook is that of a guy who got convinced to go to a party he’s now having trouble fitting in at, but one he’s still pretty glad he came to anyway . I’m not a constant status updater or gobbler of my friends’ every whim and posting,…