Moodboard (Alex's version)

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.


2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.


3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.


4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.


5. Start as close to the end as possib

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Write little phrases that will “open a door to a scene”: Often, we can’t see our entire project in its full form, but we can see little pieces of it. A curtain moving in the morning light, for example. A man sneaking around a house. Jotting down these little hints “open a door” for your future writer-self.

for most of us, our work would benefit from reaching out to others more, trusting more in our readers. I have seen, in many of my students, that the first proof of progress is that their stories become more cognizant of the existence of the reader – more fun, less unnecessarily dense, truer to life, fairer, warmer; they start engaging with issues t... See more

There are a TON of skills you need to get better at to write a good book.

Structure, story-telling, dialogue, description, scene, suspense, explanation, character-building, word choice, energy flow.

If you try to get better at everything at once, you’ll get overwhelmed and not make much progress.

Instead, pick one or two things and focus all of you... See more

6 tips from John Steinbeck on writing:

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.

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