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This past weekend, we celebrated Passover at a kids’ Seder on Saturday and Easter at an egg-and-candy hunt on Sunday. Being an interfaith, largely secular family involves a lot of this sort of doubling up. One of the shared themes of Passover and Easter (other than the obvious fact that The Last Supper was a […]

One of the things I love about having a daily writing practice is the way it feels like I’m sitting down to have a little chat with myself. I look forward to it—yes, I look forward to writing, which used to be true but has not always been true. It’s challenging to sit with our

In each of my classes, we set and check in about weekly. Regular commitment to your goals, public declaration of them and frequent tracking of them all support achievement of them. This practice, though, has a few requirements: 1) Have a goal in your heart that really matters to you, that underlies these weekly goals.

Have you ever had a great idea land on you, of a sudden? Perhaps it’s the solution to some scene or story you’ve been grappling with. Perhaps it’s a new inspiration. As soon as it arrives, it seems both miraculous and obvious, and it is the second of these two, or perhaps the combination, really,

I recently delivered one of the bonuses to my BWW students: a Publishing Workshop. We discussed query letters and how some of the published students placed books and stories. Perhaps the most important thing I talked about at the Publishing Workshop was . . .drum roll . . . rejection. We keep talking about having

People ask me about point of view often, and I often try to shrug it off a bit. Points of view can wield a lot of power, whether third or first or, occasionally, second. They do different things, but I don’t always like the way those different things are labeled or discussed because I think

There is a psychic shift that happens for me when I am on deadline. Now I am not making (writing or editing) my project into the best project I could ever do, the best story I could ever write, the best sentences I could ever create. Now I am making my project the best I

Every Sunday, The New York Times arrives in our front yard in Sebastopol. We read it all week long. Five-year-olds do not allow for leisurely Sunday mornings, but the pleasure spreads out well over the course of seven days. Little snatches of Sunday morning. So it is that I just read an article in The

1) Tell a story to children. Watch their eyes. Try to thrill them. Try to scare them. Try to reel them in. (Imaginary children are fine, too, if they are as bright and impatient with falsity and curious as real ones. They can sit still for longer.) 2) Read aloud only the last word of