Guest Post by Catherine Lanser Are you a master goal setter? If you are like me, you’ve already read all the rules of setting successful goals. Maybe you even treat your writing like a business and set goals at the end of the year or every quarter. Goal-oriented writers are all over SMART goals and […]
1. Present Tense This is the default tense of nearly all beginning writers. The trouble is that few established authors use it. It’s more of an exception than the rule. So when you write your book in present tense, it’s like you’re marking it with a giant stamp that screams to every agent, publishers, and […]
If you’re new to Bookfox, this post is a good place to start. It talks about the big picture decisions every writer needs to make, rather than the tactical decisions I talk about in most other posts. Basically, you need a giant, overarching plan for your writing life. When you start a business, you need […]
Look, this is basically a list of 100 Things Every Writer Should Do Before They Die. How many have you already done? Some of them are pretty ambitious — reading 100 books in a single year is difficult, no doubt. While others like “write fan fiction” or “go to a reading” have a much lower […]
As the year draws to a close, it’s time for writers to do some self-examination. You probably already have a sense whether this was a banner year for you or a real stinker, but you need to think about WHY. What made this a horrible year for writing or your most successful year ever? And […]
If you were a billionaire, would you still be writing? If you answered yes, then clearly writing is your calling. But what would you do differently as a billionaire writer? Would you go to 10 conferences a year? Start up a writing retreat? Hire the most expensive editor you can find? Hire 6 different editors? […]
It’s true that people write the advice they need to hear, and I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t been the perfect model for a happy writer. I had some bad years. Mrs. Bookfox definitely saw the worst of it. Part of it was chemical issues, but also I had such extravagant fantasies about […]
When I was 31 years old, I’d been laboring over a novel for 5 years. It was a quagmire. I was hopelessly stuck in a plot that wouldn’t move, in characters that couldn’t elicit sympathy, and with ambitions that were far beyond my skill as a writer. When I’d started the novel, I had a […]
I became a writer mainly because of pride. Growing up, I always had an excess of confidence. Maybe it was being a big fish in the small pond of the desert town of Hesperia, California, but I was supremely confident that I could do anything. So when figuring out what to do in life, I […]
What is “Slow Writing”? You’ve probably heard the phrase tossed around for other topics: Slow Food Slow Cinema Slow Fashion Slow Travel It’s a movement based on Carl Honore’s 2004 book, In Praise of Slowness, which is about the detrimental effects of building an entire culture around the benefits of speed. These principles about slowness can be […]
