For most of the world —although maybe not most of Florida—fall is a time of change. The weather is changing; the days are growing shorter and the light more oblique. The leaves change color and go through a moment of glory before they say goodbye until next spring. Some people find autumn melancholy, because we’re sliding into winter. But if you’re like me, you find it tonic. Change does a body good! It does a writer good too. Call it … Read More »

If a word exists it’s because there’s a reasonable, targeted use for it someplace (like there). But often, we writers fall into a habit of overusing it and its various forms. Sometimes this is due to the word’s prevalence in informal speech, which has fewer rules—and is lazier—than writing.  At that point, our word starts to become diluted, having very little meaning. And certainly, we all want to avoid watered-down vocabulary. At least, some of us do. Something Vague This … Read More »

If you think of the plotline of the novel as a geography, some of them are full of hills and dales and others are as flat as Florida. Lets call “hills” the moments of suspense, fear, or angry confrontation that spice up the horizon. “Flatlands” would be the emotionally level parts where the story chugs along. The best plots have both features, so we can’t call one better than the other—but if I only got one of them, I’d want … Read More »

We all love novels full of sensory detail—the rhythmic pulse of crickets. The opalescent colors of a summer twilight. Sight, in particular, is the chief organ we turn on the world, unless we’re unfortunate enough to have lost that faculty. We go through the world seeing things, noticing. From our primeval origins in the trees, it’s that ability that has made us safer and let us catch our prey. After that comes hearing. We get many of our signals from … Read More »

Interviewers have frequently asked me, “Where do you get your ideas?” — as if there were some mysterious wellspring from which imagination bubbles that spews out a whole plotted book. We can call this inspiration. Where does it come from? In fact, in the deeper sense, that’s not an easy question to answer. I certainly don’t understand the workings of my own brain well enough to say what childhood encounter might have spawned a certain character. But since I write … Read More »

In February and March I addressed good openings for almost any kind of writing here at the FWA blog. And in April we meandered in the middle of poems. So now, let’s talk about how to nail the perfect ending to a poem. (I apologize in advance if this turns out to be a bit of a rant. Bad endings to good poems drive me crazy!) Perhaps the most egregious crime of bad poetry is when the poet tries to … Read More »