Episode 163 of Library Life  features an interview with me at “my mother’s library,” Mt. Prospect Public Library, on my novels and becoming a writer.Read More

“Someday is now.” That’s attorney Ruth Kaufman’s motto, but ironically, her “now” is 1453, Henry VI is king, and what we now call the Wars of the Roses will soon begin. The king sends Sir Nicholas Gray to protect the recently widowed lady Amice Winfield from undesirable suitors. Though Nicholas is intrigued by her (and...Read More

    You think by now we’d be over it. How many times have we been told, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game? That we play for the love of the game, that even reputedly “very talented” teams can hit a losing streak?Read More

      Delay. Delay. Delay. Some say it’s the essence of dramatic writing. Unlike expository writing, where the first sentence of each paragraph pretty much sums up the point to be made, each sentence in dramatic writing leads the reader to the next sentence so that the reader is forced to read on —...Read More

At the Chicago Writers Conference last weekend, author and teacher Eric Charles May gave a talk about causality in fiction.  He said that we all tolerate accidents in real life, and while we may ask “Why?” or “Why me?” at various crises in our lives, we inevitably must accept that at times there are no...Read More

A good writing conference energizes and inspires as well as providing new information, or at least old information in a fresh way.  Chicago Writers Conference, which wrapped up today, was a great writing conference.  Speakers were candid, generous and actually concerned, it seemed, with sharing information rather than gratifying their own egos.  While shattering dreams...Read More

In my last column (“A ‘know-it-all’ approach to writing,” June 27), I wrote about Colm Toibin’s advice that a writer should know the whole story before writing his or her novel. Since I’ve always discovered the story by writing it, this for me would be a new way of working — but one I’m willing...Read More

June 27, 2014 For two years now, we’ve been writing about crafting your first novel and I have insisted that you don’t need to know your whole story in order to begin.  This has worked for me through the process of writing a dozen novels, but recently I heard Colm Tóibín (Brooklyn, The Testament of...Read More

April 25, 2014 One of the comforts of being a writer is getting to write. But as soon as you publish those carefully chosen words, you’re suddenly expected to become a speaker. Lawyers have the advantage in this regard of having developed their presentation skills, but courtroom drama and negotiating-table dramatics are slightly different arts...Read More

Happy 2014, the year in which you will write that novel — or short story, or essay, or memoir, or poem, or all of the above. Amicus Scriptor will appear in even-numbered months in 2014, and I’ll be responding to “questions from the audience” as well as continuing to support you in your creative writing...Read More