I’m a disaster at cocktail parties

Here’s the question I get all the time, the minute I identify myself as a book coach. (Not that there aren’t, like, 1,634 definitions of that job title alone. Me, I’m what you’d call a developmental editor.) Can a person write a book in a weekend?...

Present Tense vs. Past Tense

Lately, I’ve been having the same conversation with my coaching clients, which makes me think I should share this lesson with you nice people, too. (If you’re not a writer, start paying attention to this stuff I’m going to share as a reader.  It will...

Oh, the lure of research

It was Dennis Lehane, author of  Mystic River who admonished us fledgling writers to knock off all the research when working on our books. He’d just gotten a huge movie deal, Clint Eastwood was directing, so there he was at Harvard telling us all how he got to...

Beautiful Language That Says Jack Shit

Lately, I’ve had my head in manuscripts just rife with purple prose. Purple prose, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is writing that’s so extravagant, ornate, or flowery, it breaks the flow and draws excessive attention to itself. Purple prose is...