Heather Webb You’ve been DYING to hear back from that critique partner, editor, agent, friend. You stalk your inbox. When the document finally arrives, you break into a sweat. What if they HATED everything? Then you think, naaah. That’s not possible. Your pages are so shiny you’ve gotta wear shades just to read them. So […]

Steena Holmes My house is quiet and I’m nursing a hot cup of coffee (my third actually) while staring at the screen and wondering what else I have left in me to write today. I don’t think there’s much. You see, last night I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning working on […]

Susan Spann In addition to writing novels and practicing law, I have a marine aquarium filled with corals and seahorses. I started reef-keeping years ago, though I’ve loved aquariums (and seahorses, especially) all my life. I knew, from the outset, that seahorses rank very high on the aquarium difficulty scale, and that they require a […]

Shannon Donnelly Backstory—the background needed to enrich a story—is one of those things that can drive any writer nuts. How much is too much? When do you reveal more? When do you hold back? Too much backstory can sink a story—because you’re not moving the story forward. You’re giving background, and while that can be […]

If you’ve been a reader of WITS for some time, you’ve seen us joke about process envy on a number of occasions. What is it about writers that makes us so convinced someone else has the secret ingredient to the guaranteed-best-seller process? Laura and I were brainstorming a couple of weeks ago and I mentioned […]