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In my practice as a writer and a book editor and coach, I often ask myself and my clients: can you make this worse?   What I mean by that is: Can you go deeper? What is under this layer? [...]

Hey everybody, it’s Ginger, writer and writing professor, and I’m here to talk today about the dream of writing a book. I’m going to start off with another story, which is that when I was a little, little girl, [...]

(At the beginning of The Body of Summer, Dr. Kendall Grant, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, answers the phone to hear her ex-husband, a local contractor, ask her to find a lawyer for him. He has [...]

Chapter One: Memorial Day I knew from experience a phone call from Colin always ruined my day. So when my ex-husband called at dawn I fumbled the phone and dropped it right after I heard his voice. Before picking [...]

It was a while after my husband left that I remembered my grandmother’s house. My mother’s mother once lived in a house her cousin had won in a poker game. My grandmother and the owner of the house were [...]

There are many ways to learn how to plot. I learned the hard way. I was very honored when Lisa Tener said in an interview that she had really liked the plot of American Queen. Like dialogue, I felt that [...]

I am so honored that Lisa Tener interviewed me for her Spotlight blog on her How to Write a Book site. One thing she said about the book was that the dialogue was great. I was surprised and pleased [...]

It is always a fun guessing game to wonder if writers have taken people from their own lives and turned them into characters.There are some fairly obvious examples, in political satire, for instance. George Orwell’s animals in Animal Farm each [...]

I’m about as white at they come. I don’t mean only skin color—though that shows absolutely no trace of melanin. I’m talking inherited whiteness. And I’m talking acquired whiteness. And, finally, I’m talking about how life hates such neat divisions [...]

I’m a t-ball mom. If national elections took place in the spring, we would be famous. We who drive our kids and black and white balls in the fall switch to kids and baseball gloves in the spring. Same [...]