When composing your story, don’t neglect the setting. Is it warm or cold? Spring or fall? Dawn or midnight? Does your story take place in an urban setting or on a rural farm? Are desert sands blowing or are ocean waves crashing? Or is the morning air at the beach warm and humid on aRead …Read More »

I have a new motto: Read endlessly… Write fearlessly… Edit ferociously. But don’t let that word ferociously scare you. Instead, charge fearlessly ahead as you write your first draft and ignore that tiger of an editor chasing your script. Put him in a cage and don’t let him out until you’ve finished writing whatever part of theRead …Read More »

A year or two ago, a novel by Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train, was all the rage. It seemed to me that it was mentioned every time I turned on the radio, and people, including some of my friends, were reading it. It was touted as providing an exceptionally good example of theRead …Read More »

London, Sydney, or Tokyo? As we stood by this directional sign on a small island in the middle of the South Pacific, my husband and I chose Sydney, by way of Noumea, as we were sailing. But we did not wait until we were in Apia, the capital of Samoa (formerly known as Western Samoa),Read …Read More »

Remember what it was like when you were a child and heard those magic words, Once upon a time…? It was like a switch was flipped in your brain, and suddenly every cell in your body was straining toward the storyteller, waiting for what would come next. In fact, if you were seated, your bodyRead …Read More »