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 […]

  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 […]

Lisa Hall Wilson                 Deep point of view is a great writing technique when used well, but if you’re not careful, deep POV will bloat your word count and tie an anchor to the pace of your story. Pace Must Be Strategic I’ve met very few bestselling authors […]