Writing

I realized my book could focus on what I cared about most

Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts.

When I was in graduate school for my MFA, I had lunch with my friend John, who was studying industrial psychology across campus. He was telling me how he liked writing, but he had a real block beca…

Seven things to help you move forward even when you need to know how to write a book when you have no idea what you're doing.

Sean Willson is a software engineering manager with a weakness for science fiction. In a previous blog post, the author of six books shared how he finds time to write despite having a full-time job and family. Today, Sean explains how he manages his writing process (almost) exclusively in Ulysses.

There is nothing more sustaining to long-term creative work than time and space – and these things cost money

Hey Week 5 and you’re hitting the hump aren’t you? I can feel it. I get to this point also. It’s where the adrenaline of the initial idea is wearing off and you’re starting to find conjuring drama difficult and writing is hard and it’s just easier to muck about on the internet, and the book you’re reading is making you think, I am terrible, everything I do is terrible, I’ll never be as good as this, and you’re ready to junk it in.

How long does it take to write a book? Stephen King says writing a book should take no more than three months—and this author discovered he's right.

President Abraham Lincoln was a big fan: “it’s a very useful little chap.”

Get your work recognized: write a brag document

Has somebody accused you of writing about them when you don't even know them? Sometimes your fiction can trigger people when life imitates fiction.

One day, in my intro to creative writing class, after I had my students spend a few minutes free-writing in response to a Frida Kahlo painting, one of them raised her hand. “Do you mind if I ask a…

Scott Dikkers shares the 10 writing rules that took The Onion from a local print magazine to a globally renowned media house with nearly 20 million social followers and over 10 million monthly visitors.

Claire Fuller shares the many ways flash fiction can be useful to all types of writers, even if your word count is usually in the thousands.

In this week’s mailbag: Have you ever made an altered book?

1. Dragon Naturally Speaking by Nuance. Dragon is pretty much the gold standard for dictation. And Nuance seems to have invented the entire industry before dictation was cool. They have deep roots in medical transcription, for example. Die hard dictators swear by the PC version of this software. The Macintosh version was (puzzlingly) discontinued last year. Since Dragon has such a big reach, lifelong Mac users have been known to purchase cheap PCs to run this software.

When it comes to writing the “other,” what questions are we not asking?

The Granta team share writing techniques and advice from their archives.

Barbara Linn Probst delves into the very heart of your novel: its "About-ness." Learn the questions (and answers) that help your story resonate deeper with readers.

Adapted from the essay “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits” in Essays One. * The following are just my personal pieces of advice. They won’t be the same as someone else’s, and they may …

50,000 words isn't an arbitrary number

Do yourself a favor and read these 10 pieces of advice first.