Category: Writing Advice
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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,…
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Post #154: Upcoming Book Event
Friends, readers, country-persons, lend me your (virtual) ears…and eyes! This coming Wednesday, Sept. 14th @ 7PM EST, I have a virtual book event hosted by Cambridge Common Writers, and you should check it out. I’ll be reading from my debut novel, Blowin’ My Mind Like a Summer Breeze, and talking…
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Post #140: A Book of Magical Sentences
I recently finished Joan Didion’s National Book Award winning memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, and I can’t stop thinking about it. If you’ve never read it, it’s an account of the heartbreaking death of her husband John at the same time her daughter is battling a life-threatening illness. It’s…
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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…
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Post #138: You Know it When You Hear It
Since my publisher, Deep Hearts YA, does not do much with audiobooks just yet, one of the tasks I’ve given myself in anticipation of my debut novel coming out next year is independently producing an audiobook of my book to accompany the paperback and e-book release. Why? Mostly because I…
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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…
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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…
Benjamin Roesch 