process – Confabulator Cafe

On Using NaNoWriMo as Intended

Ashley M. Hill - November 4, 2015

Welcome to the dawn of day four (of NaNoWriMo), and a new liveblogger! (Not new. You know me. I’ve been here forever.) Since you haven’t met my novel yet, let me start you off there: There are a lot of things to say about the challenges of writing a story set in 1914 in a city […]

NaNoWriMo #6 part two

Jason Arnett - November 10, 2013

I was supposed to post this yesterday but things conspired to help me forget. Nothing bad, though, just life which gets in the way of everything that needs to be done, right? At the beginning of this I set a daily word count goal of 2000 per day and as an average I’ve hit that. […]

Entertain Yourself. The Others Can Wait.

Larry Jenkins - May 7, 2012

I think a lot of writers hate themselves, at least a little. We desperately want to have someone look at our writing and tell us that it’s good, that they want to publish it, and that we are worthy of the career we’ve been pursuing. We want readers and respect and most of all, validation. […]

Character development

Paul Swearingen - February 25, 2012

In the past – say around Dickens’ time – often writers would employ the clunky technique of establishing characters by stopping the story and then describing a character in detail: clothing, shape of brow, past indiscretions, jaw shape, blemishes, the whole bit. Characters were doomed to their roles from the start by birthmarks, the shape […]

Panning for Gold in the Dark

Nancy Cayton Myers - January 27, 2012

A couple of weeks back the fabulous Confabulators weighed in on where their writing ideas come from. I may backtrack a bit over some of that territory, because where they come from seems to be connected to the ideas I end up pursuing past the ‘idea’ stage. Looking back on the thousands of words I’ve […]