U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser said that titles “…represent the hand you extend in friendship toward your reader.” He was talking about titles of poems, but his words apply to titling your book as well. Yes, people buy books because they’re interested in the concept, but just as important is their assessment of the cover. So, titling your book is a huge marketing decision. A title tells people what to think about...

Writer’s block. Just thinking those words can give a writer nightmares, but we’ve all been plagued by this inevitable phenomenon at some point. It can take days, months, or even years to get past this dreaded obstacle, and there’s no one-size-fits-all method for dealing with it. However, there are some techniques I’ve found to be useful over the years, and though this is by no means an exhaustive list, I’d like...

Creating worlds from scratch is tough work. Fun and fulfilling, but tough. This means that sometimes our writer brains and Creativity Well get depleted. We’ve used up everything we had and we can’t even remember the word for the washer thingy in the kitchen! I like to think of the Creative Well as a real stone well, like from the “Jack and Jill went up a hill” story. It’s tall...

There’s something about taking a personality test and seeing if the results actually match up with who you are. Growing up, I would go straight to the quiz section of any magazine (remember holding and reading an actual magazine?), and even now, I can’t resist a Buzzfeed quiz (yes, I want to see if the quiz-maker can correctly identify my zodiac sign based on the way I like my coffee)....

Hello. My name is RJ and I’m in the closet. The writer’s closet.  Disclaimer: This is my first official writing credit. Woohoo! For perhaps the first time, I found a way to make my insecurities work for me by turning them into a pitch. And wouldn’t it be amazing if they worked for someone else too? If this article helps even one person come out of the writer’s closet I...

As much as we’d all like to deny it, writing isn’t always easy. Ideas don’t always flow. Inspiration isn’t always readily available. Suboptimal life circumstances dampen the creative flow. And none of us are strangers to the dreaded imposter syndrome, when doubts about our abilities assault us so viciously we feel like a fraud even calling ourselves a writer. We’ve all found ourselves in that negative mindspace, but you don’t...

Research. The word alone is like a strike of lightning for some writers, already dreaming of stone-faced castles in the Highlands or a handsome Scotsman riding through the glen (hello, Jamie Fraser). For these literary souls, the research phase deepens their storytelling. For others, the thought of fifty-seven open tabs on their browser is already too much to bear. Forget about trying to unearth which type of undergarments were typically...

In an ideal world, we would all have a fabulous, productive writing session easily every day. But unfortunately, we don’t live in that world.  Writing isn’t the only thing going on in our lives, and sometimes seasons of life come up that make it necessary to take a short break from writing. Last year my husband and I were house hunting (very stressful!) and then moving ourselves and our two...