I was nine years old in Mrs. Orr’s fourth-grade class. She gave me a task that changed my life. We were going on a two-week trip to Florida. She asked me to write every day in a diary. I wrote in that notebook everywhere we went. On the beach, in the car, and at rest […]
I spent three years on my first novel. I never finished it. The story was stuck in a folder, 47,000 words long, going nowhere. I blamed writer’s block and my schedule, but the real issue was I had no plan. Then I found James Thayer’s writing podcast. He showed how to write with before-and-after examples. […]
I stood in front of thirty high school students one Tuesday morning. They looked at me. I looked back. A kid in the third row asked, “Have you ever written a real book?” The room fell silent. I hadn’t, not yet. That question stayed with me for years. My journey to writing books was not […]
I once sat at my desk for three hours, staring at a cursor. Not a word was written. D.H. Lawrence said the pain of not writing was worse than writing itself. That night, I felt the same way. The blank screen was like a wall, and my ideas were on the other side. The next […]
I remember Jerry B. Jenkins saying he wrote over 200 books in 50 years. He’s famous for the Left Behind series. He told an interviewer that every book started with a simple plan. This kept him from feeling lost. If you dream of writing a book, you’re not alone. Millions have stories they want to […]
I sat in a coffee shop in 2015, staring at a blank Word document. The cursor blinked at me like a tiny, mocking heartbeat. I wanted to write a book so badly I could taste it. But I had no clue where to begin. That day, I typed exactly fourteen words before deleting them all […]
In 2005, Sara Gruen started writing “Water for Elephants” during National Novel Writing Month. She wrote 50,000 words in 30 days. This rough draft became a bestseller and a movie. Starting to write a book can seem scary. Novels usually have about 100,000 words. That’s a lot of pages. When I first wanted to write […]
Twenty years ago, I sat beside my wife’s hospital bed. She was seriously unwell. I had a laptop and a story burning inside me. That story became a 190,000-word manuscript. It landed me an agent and a six-figure deal with HarperCollins. My first book became a bestseller sold across foreign territories. I’ve published a new […]
A writer sat by his wife’s bedside during her illness. He had no fancy office or ideal conditions. But he had a story burning inside him. He typed away every night while she rested. By the time she recovered, he had a 190,000-word manuscript. This landed him a six-figure deal with HarperCollins and made his […]
I was in a coffee shop in Portland, staring at a 120,000-word manuscript. It was a mess. Every chapter was too long. Every character was the same. I’d written for eight months. A stranger, a retired editor from Penguin Random House, saw my screen. She said, “Your story needs less stuff.” She was right. I […]
