Writer Unboxed

Today’s post is intended for any writers who occasionally encounter… well, let’s call them obstacles. I’m talking about the sort of thing that grinds your writing to a halt. Whether it writer’s block, the conspicuous absence of the muse, or just the feeling that every single word you write stinks worse than Satan’s dirty gym [...]

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Therese here. You know Kath and I loved Robin LaFevers‘ guest post on April 6th, The Writer’s Life is Full of Second Chances (or: Abandon Despair, All Ye Who Enter Here). Our guess is that you did too if your 280 re-tweets and 406 Facebook shares account for anything. When we invited Robin to come [...]

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GIVEAWAY: I am (again) excited to give away a free copy of either the 2012 Guide to Literary Agents or Formatting & Submitting Your Manuscript, 3rd Ed., to a random commenter. Comment within one week; winners must live in Canada/US to receive the book by mail. Good luck to all! (UPDATE: Chad Lynch won.) One [...]

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No matter what you write – whether it’s romance, literary fiction, fantasy, or the increasingly popular genre of historical vampire chick-lit zombie western mystery – at some point each of you will be called upon to write about the same thing: yourself. There’s no avoiding it. If you’re writing with the goal of publication, it’s [...]

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Last month I kicked off the Flip the Script series by advising writers to backwardize a tired writing cliche and Tell, Don’t Show. For April, let’s take another oft-heard, much-repeated bit of writing advice and turn it on its head. What are we constantly told? Write what you know. What should we try instead? Write [...]

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Please welcome today’s guest, Jennifer Gooch Hummer. Jennifer is the debut author of a YA novel called Girl Unmoored. What’s the book about? Apron Bramhall has come unmoored. It’s 1985 and her mom has passed away, her evil stepmother is pregnant, and her best friend has traded her in for a newer model. Fortunately, she’s about [...]

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I’ll admit, between the title of this post and the accompanying image I’ve chosen, I may be guilty of making today’s post seem a bit more… titillating than it really is. After all, most people won’t consider my topic even remotely sexy. I mean, I guess it is something you could do in bed. But [...]

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We hear the same writing advice over and over. Show, don’t tell. Write what you know. Kill your darlings. And sometimes those old chestnuts are helpful, but just as often, rules become walls, which is no good for anyone. Walls block. Walls negate. Walls keep us from moving forward. There are exceptions to every rule, and in fact, [...]

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Tell a tale to twenty listeners and it becomes twenty different stories. Each listener brings to it his own aspirations, prejudices, fears, hopes, hang-ups and so on. In the time of oral storytelling, when tales were told around the campfire to help make sense of a world that was often dark and daunting, the tribe [...]

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Given today’s date, it seems only appropriate that my post should be about “the L word.” (Love, that is; not lederhosen. We’ll talk about that some other time, when the memory is not so painful. But I digress…) Back to love. I’m a big fan of it. And I really appreciate when authors get love [...]

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So you know we’re not happy unless we’re trying something new. Our latest push: gearing up to premier a spanky new Writer Unboxed newsletter in March. This newsletter isn’t a regurgitation of what you’ve already read here. It’ll offer fresh content, including: 21 Century Tips: short-and-pertinent tips offered by our WU craft-master, Donald Maass Ask [...]

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As many of you know, our first-ever WU auction was plagued last weekend due to a distributed denial-of-service attack, which took out our site, forced us to change hosts and IP addresses, and generally gave us a lot of gray hair and required the scheduling of massages. Because many of you were either – a. [...]

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