I know it’s hard to believe, but there are some people out there, writers among them, who don’t believe a condition like writer’s block really exists.  They think it’s a myth, a grandiose theory perpetuated by the lazy, the liars, and the plain bone-idle, and by those airy-fairy arty-farty types - the dilettante - who like the idea of writing and love the idea of being known as a writer, but in reality just don’t have the stomach for the genuinely hard work of conceiving, writing and…

One side of everything is what I like to call first-person singular.  So, not ‘Tom, Dick, or Harry did this, that, or the other,’ but ‘I did this, I did that, I did. Me.’  One side of everything is exactly what a writer shows to a reader when they write in the first-person, and while this approach may, at first glance, seem to offer a very narrow and limited range of creative options, in many circumstances what could be viewed as a handicap can actually be an…

In theory, writing dialogue should be one of the easiest things in the world.  It should be like breathing, blinking, and breaking wind – real-world talents that every one of us shares (although some of us are far better at the latter than others).  After all, we mostly all talk a great deal, and we mostly all hear others talking (sometimes far more than we might want to), in our day to day lives, at work, and on TV, so we can’t really claim that it’s something of a major challenge to simply…