Sierra Godfrey Remember when you booked a flight to Marseille, France for research purposes? You toured Fort Saint-Jean, strolled around the Vieux Port, and lunched on bouillabaisse at a charming little café in Old Le Panier? Or how about the way the fishing boats sounded when they chug-chug-chugged into the harbor and the fishermen poured […]

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 […]

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 […]

Janice Hardy Unless you're incredibly lucky, at some point in your writing life you're bound to fall into a rut. The novel you loved yesterday feels flat today, all your ideas sound "meh" and nothing really excites you about your current manuscript. It happens, and scary as it can be, there are ways to knock […]