Something that can bog down new writers – or prevent would-be new writers from ever setting pen to paper – is feeling like they’re expected to have “new” ideas, or it isn’t worth it. The fear of being called derivative or unoriginal is daunting. Let’s break down this insecurity in a few ways: theme, plot, setting, character, and style.
Continue reading “How Novel Does My Novel Need to Be?”Month: May 2025
Five Creative Moods
Even if you don’t have a day job, a family, a social life, or other hobbies, there’s only so much time in the day for writing. If you want to finish your book, you must maximize that time. For me, the act of wringing maximum productivity out of myself is to gauge my mindset and do the thing most conducive to that mood. This isn’t to champion the idea of avoiding discipline – sometimes you must simply make yourself stick to priorities even if you don’t want to – but when I work intuitively like this, I usually feel like no matter what, I’m drawing nearer to my goal. It’s a way of continually “working” even when I’m too tired or distracted to do any “real” writing.
Continue reading “Five Creative Moods”The Green Globe is a Chrysalis for the Lost City
If you’re confused by the title of this blog post, you’re in good company. I don’t understand it either. The meaning evaporated around 3 am on a random Tuesday, along with the dream that inspired it ….
I distinctly recall waking from an absorbing and cinematic dream in the middle of the night and dictating those words into a voice memo, confident that Future Me could unpack from them the freight necessary to write a new novel, as if the phrase were Mary Poppins’ handbag. (In my defense, this usually works.) When I played the words back the next morning, they meant nothing. Not a glimmer of recollection, and certainly not an epic blockbuster of a novel.
Continue reading “The Green Globe is a Chrysalis for the Lost City”Stages of Writing a Novel
Notes
For me, the first stage of writing a novel is the notes. This is where I accumulate every possible idea for what could be in the book. It’s important not to limit yourself, to tell yourself you can only write down “good” ideas. First, you must get through quite a lot of “bad” ideas before you get to the “good” ones.
And second – the reason I keep using quotation marks – is that ideas are only good or bad in context. If you’re writing a grimdark war novel filled with violence and nihilism, a romantic subplot filled with all the loving and tender dialogue you spent hours drafting might be a “bad” idea. But that doesn’t mean your work is wasted. When you get to the point of carving out ideas that don’t fit in the book, you don’t need to delete them – you can put them in a separate file to maybe use later. More on that in a minute.
Continue reading “Stages of Writing a Novel”Painting a Novel
There is a lot of advice out there geared toward writers, but I find it more helpful to think of the process the way a Renaissance painter might approach a new painting.
First, a theme, the more specific the better. “Motherly love” is nice but vague. “The wistful feelings of a mother gazing at her child knowing that child will grow beyond her reach and will suffer in ways she cannot prevent” is more specific and, by the narrowness of its scope, makes it easier for us and our audience to gauge our success. Limitations are freeing; by defining a narrow scope of theme, we automatically rule out a vast amount of material that doesn’t belong in our composition, and now we can focus on the few things that really matter. In this case, the expression on the mother’s face, the tilt of her head, the set of her mouth, and especially her eyes.
Continue reading “Painting a Novel”
Chronicler's Note: 