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
Read all about it in today’s Chicago Tribune, Lifestyle section. Reproduced below: chicagotribune.com Remarkable Woman Mary Hutchings Reed, lawyer turned writer Lawyer fulfills long-deferred dream of being a writer By Bill Daley, Tribune Newspapers 12:00 AM CST, January 24, 2014 Mary Hutchings Reed had three Ivy League degrees, launched her legal career in 1976 and...Read More
Unlike so many well-intentioned but ill-fated New Year’s resolutions, if yours is to finally write that novel you’ve been dreaming about for years, you’ve chosen one that’s easy to keep. The “write my novel in 2014” resolution is ambitious but doable, and comfortably so. Unlike the marathon of National Novel Writing Month, the novel-in-a-year plan...Read More
Happy to say I finished NaNoWriMo with the first very rough draft of an untitled novel that might be in a unique genre called Christian Legal PsychoDrama. But it’s at least a year away from seeing the light of day. Just happy to have the “clay” for the coming year. Thanks to The Office of...Read More
November is National Novel Writing Month — or “NaNoWriMo” for short. The idea is that you start writing a novel on Nov. 1 and, even though the month is one day shy of “normal,” you will produce a novel by midnight on Nov. 30. The organizers, a “tiny but mighty” nonprofit called the Office of...Read More
Here’s my guest blog post on SheWrites.com’s Behind the Book. The other day I autographed my novel, Warming Up, published by She Writes Press, for a friend of a friend who I was told was a writer herself. Since my novel is, in part, about talented artists who are unable, at the start of the...Read More
