Every writer needs a good support group—like AA except they’re doing a searching and fearless moral inventory of your manuscript, not you personally. This can be a collection of secondary readers you can bribe/browbeat/blackmail into looking at your work or a more formal arrangement for critique and commiseration. At some point, all of you will have days when the writing just feels like mush. Here’s what to keep in mind: If you don’t know, ask. Asking questions helps get to t

When you picture a writer, the accepted image is a misanthrope with glasses hunched over their computer, possibly clutching a cup of a tea. If they have tea, then they’re more of a charming curmudgeon. If they have Scotch, that’s when you should be worried. Here are some other things people think when they imagine writers and whether or not they’re true. 1. Writers are mean. False. Going to conferences and pitching agents alongside way too many other hopefuls does fee

So, I met Margaret Atwood at an event once, and I liked her enough to tell my sister to buy my mom her memoir for Christmas (mom is also a fan). I flicked through that memoir, and in it, she said that each writer was actually two people—the one doing the writing and the one doing the living. What she didn’t say was how rarely the designated muse actually deigns to show up at the computer. Often, it’s the person who’s doing the living staring at the screen, thinking how this i

Every year, I go to the Surrey International Writers’ Conference. The tea is plentiful—which is most important—and so are the other writers. Conversations are with people also interested in the review bombing scandal a couple years ago that doesn’t really have a name. Here’s how to make that small talk work. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single writer in possession of an unpublished novel, must be in wont of an audience. Ask about their book! Their book isn’t

I’ve recently finished another draft of my novel and sent it to my secondary readers aka long-suffering friends and family to edit. This is one of those times in the writing process that reminds me just how close fizzing excitement is to fizzing anxiety. They both have the potential to blow the lid off the soda bottle. I’m a grown up with forehead furrows and opinions on the Oxford comma, but I still feel about my work the way a second grader feels about their art class glitt

And it made my night. My day. My month. Maybe my year… My mother and I were at one of her events, an author cocktail meet and greet, munching on canapes and pretending to be classy. There was strawberry-mint ice tea, coffee-chocolate truffles, and literary conversation where we all tried to sound like intellectuals worthy of the shiny wood columns and waterfront view outside (you don’t host Margaret Atwood in a dump). I felt like a giddy fangirl clinging to my question: Why d