I first learned about Golden Lines the summer I attended the UCI Summer Writing Institute. After a particularly dense morning lecture, we were told to extract the golden lines, the ideas that we could use to improve our writing. Every year after the RWA Conference, I like to share the Golden Lines I've highlighted from […]

Susan Donovan   Pages per day. Word count. Butt in chair. Drop-dead due dates. These are our mantras, the rhythm of the writing life. Whether we work for ourselves or New York publishing houses, we authors are ninjas when it comes to merciless goal setting and self-flagellation. But what do we do if our lives […]

I chose this month's first page to explain writing tight. I am a 'spare writer', meaning that I cut every unnecessary word, so the read is fast and easy. If a word doesn't tell the reader something they don't know in a compelling way, out it goes. I'm not saying that you have to cut […]

  Most novels are written on the premise of "what if." Our What-if muscles help us figure out what needs to come next in the story. Sometimes we're lucky and we just know. More often (at least for me) we often have no clue what needs to happen next. When I write non-fiction for awhile, […]

Kathryn Craft Turning Whine Into Gold In high school, I was the type of high achiever that had my teachers taking me under their wings. Turns out, that wasn’t always such a good thing. My fifth-year Russian teacher, thinking I’d follow in his footsteps, challenged me to write a research paper on a Russian ballerina—in […]