Don’t let rejection get you down. You’re a writer, damn it! Write.

Writing ain’t easy. At its best, it’s a joyous, giddy process, but at its worst, it can be a grinding, maddening slog through the thickets of your imagination, like wandering the Library of Babel without being able to read the signs. You may find yourself with a passel of story and no decent characters to [...]

In this blog and the comments section that comes with every post, we here at Scribophile have discussed many aspects of writing and the literary life. Characters, plot, favorite books, background music, and approaches to writing: we’ve covered a lot of ground, and there’s still more to cover. But, I like to try and get [...]

Let’s talk story length. Usually, in writing programs or in workshops, the focus for most writers is either on producing short stories or novels. There are good reasons for this. For one thing, those are the primary salable forms of narrative works. Short stories can get you into the professional magazines, while novels are generally [...]

Not too long ago, I was perusing the Q&A section on my LinkedIn profile, and saw a question posted in one of the groups I belong to about selling a book to publishers. The person who posted the question was basically asking if he/she needed to include foul language and sex in the story being [...]

Ever get tired of your characters? Maybe you’re writing a novel, or an interconnected series of short stories, or maybe it’s a narrative poem, but whatever the form, you get to a certain place and you look at the page and you think, “Man, that character has got to go. I’m going to kill him/her/them [...]