Then there’s that moment at three thousand pages into your novel, where this little helper calculates structure for you. When do you know if you’re in middle act? Or is it even the beginning of the book? Are you in the dark night of soul yet? These questions trouble us, make our writing seem flat, […]

Until you set benchmarks for how far along you are in writing a book, it’s easy to feel like you’re wandering aimlessly. Most authors starts out setting ambitious due dates and a vague amount of words they’ll write. They figure their willpower will eventually string enough word together from where they are now to reach […]

Because we don’t remember that calendar days aren’t writing days, most writers begins with a deadline and conclude with panic. That’s also the space where manuscripts goes to die. Here’s how it goes down: You have three months to produce a draft, so you split out the word count into ninety, convince yourself it will […]

Viewpoint rotation becomes a choreography problem for most writers. You’ve got dancers on stage and you want them to move in time, never tripping each other up. This means they naturaly gravitate towards mathematical perfection. If I’ve got three protagonist, I’ll give them each a third of the space. Feels fair. Looks nice on the […]