• Better Than You Think

    The first time you ran into a wall it came as a surprise. Not because you didn’t believe in walls, but because you didn’t know they could appear in the middle of a sentence. But you broke through it like the Kool-Aid Man, with the same broad smile, the same blatant disregard for plaster and paint. Because you were a writer and that’s what writers do. They persist. And persist you did. Through the next wall and the next, until one day you hesitated. Do other writers run into this many walls? you wondered.  Writing used to be about ideas and dreams. Once, you were an architect with an empty skyline and…

  • The Blinking* Cursor

    You know how it goes. You follow your inspired muse to the page and start writing and everything’s going great, then 1000 words in, you hit a wall. A big fat concrete wall with barbed wire strung across the top. Maybe the wall is a plot hole. Maybe it’s a character who is suddenly acting out of character. Or maybe you’re just really, really tired because you stayed up all night reading Anna Karenina so you can honestly say “Yes, I’ve read Anna Karenina” should anyone in your writers’ group ask if you’ve read Anna Karenina because that’s the sort of thing you imagine writers in writers’ groups ask whenever…