Barbara’s Blogs on the Craft of Writing
- A 2020 Vision
- A Dozen Solutions to the “Dialogue Tag”
- A Fresh Look at "Writing What You Know"
- A Place to Write
- A Protagonist We Can Root For: Likable, relatable, neither or both?
- Award-winning author: What does it mean?
- Back-Seeding Your Story: Writing in Spirals
- Begin at the Beginning ... or Maybe Not
- Beta Readers: Who, When, Why, and So What?
- Beyond Description: Story-Relevant Aspects of Setting
- Blurbing and Being Blurbed
- Bringing a Character to Life
- Character Time and Reader Time
- Choosing a Publicist (Again): Assessing Your Changing Needs
- Choosing a Publicist: Ruling-out and Ruling-in
- Cooking Life into Fiction: Writing from what you know
- Everything You've Always Wanted to Know about Hybrid Publishing
- Finding Myself at the Big Ball of Hair in Jefferson, Texas
- Finding the Path to Authenticity
- Four of the Best Writing Exercises—Ever!
- Genre and Gender: Grappling with the awkward question of “women’s fiction”
- Getting Book Endorsements (Blurbs)
- Getting Book Endorsements
- How The Piano Made Me a Better Writer
- How Your Book Ends, Destination or Discovery?
- It’s About Time
- Launching a Book: Baby, Art, or Product?
- Learning from Pinocchio
- Likable and Relatable: Why (and how) do they matter?
- Maps, Webs, and Grids for the Visual-Spatial Writer...and for all of us
- Marathons, Sprints, and Pounces: A three-tier approach to launching your novel
- Organic Coherence: Enhancing a scene's effectiveness
- Pausing at the Border of Fiction
- Peer Critique Versus Professional Editing: When, Why and How to Use Both
- Read Like A Writer, Write Like A Reader
- Road, Neighborhood, Sky: A Three-Layered Approach to Writing a Novel
- Scene Coherence from the Reader's Perspective
- Search-and-destroy or search-and-employ?
- Searching for Georgia O'Keeffe
- Should you hire a social media assistant?
- Something That Might Not Actually Be True
- Taking it Scene by Scene: The middle level of writing
- Ten Ways to Make Your Point
- The Heart of a Novel: Its "About-ness"
- The Miracle Question: What do I want?
- The Second Time Around: The External Experience
- The Source of the Music
- The Spark of a Novel: Five Ways to Light that Spark
- There's Writing—and Then There's Writing About Writing
- Thirty-eight Questions My Daughter Asked Me
- Thirty-six Authors Tell it Like It Is: The Highs, Lows, and Surprises of Being a Debut Author
- Three Aspects of Revision
- Three Aspects of Your Book's "Aboutness": Goal, Question, and Premise
- Trusting the Reader
- Un-dead Darlings
- Visual-Spatial Tools for Mapping-and Enhancing-Your Story
- What Is Your Story About, Anyway?
- What Makes Readers Give an Unknown Author a Chance?
- What Makes You Love a Novel?
- What to Do While You Wait
- Why Do We Write, When Writing Is Hard?
- Why Was My Protagonist So Prickly?
- Why We Write
- Why Your Book Matters
- Wild and Crazy Research Tales
- Writing as Art, Identity, or Profession?
- You Never Know the Difference Your Book Might Make