on murder, consent, ChatGPT’s copyright confession, and the literary limits of AI — All this talk of ChatGPT has me worried that I’ll soon be out of a job, so I decided to put it to the test. Could ChatGPT write fiction? Could it write good fiction? Below you will find my exchange with ChatGPT transcribed verbatim, with my editorial notes in parenthesis…

Embracing Uncertainty, Solitude, and the Ticking Clock — I’ve been writing seriously for more than half of my life, and writing for the love of it ever since I could pick up a crayon. I published my first book twenty years ago, a linked story collection that sold fewer than 2,000 copies. By then, I had been diligently…

We embrace rituals in so many aspects of our lives: the morning ritual (coffee, shower, bed-making), the evening ritual (pajamas, reading, lights-out), holiday rituals, rituals to celebrate and to mourn. Your writing life deserves a ritual too. In Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey describes the writing rituals of…

How to (Gently) Break up with Your Stuff — Like all creative types, writers tend to accumulate. Buying is easy. One can always conjure up a need, real or imagined. One can always envision a place in one’s home or in one’s life for those shoes (won’t they look great at the reading?), that bookshelf (to handle the ever-growing…

Or should you just start with chapter one? — A student in my novel-writing class recently asked, “Should my novel have a prologue?” While there’s really no hard and fast rule about prologues, there are a few questions to ask to determine if a prologue is right for your novel. What is a prologue? A prologue is simply a chapter that comes before…