Writing
Craft essays for writers, by writers — editing, style, publishing, and the process behind getting words from a blank page to something worth reading.
The Complete Guide to Actually Finishing What You Write
Most writing advice is about the sentence. This guide is about the much harder problem underneath it: actually finishing the thing, and making the version you finish better than the one you started wi…
by David Carter · 🦁 33 · 💬 4 · 11 hours ago
Jenni Fagan Shares Literary Loves and a Lesson from Maya Angelou
Scottish author Jenni Fagan recently opened up about the books that shaped her life. Her earliest memories involve an intense fascination with fairytales, which she deeply internalized as vital moral …
by David Carter · 🦁 3 · 💬 0 · 1 day ago
Why I still write everything by hand first
Every announcement, every policy update, every hard email I've had to send on this platform — first draft, on paper, pen. Then I type it up and it usually changes by half. Typing invites editing befor…
by Pantho Bihosh · 🦁 11 · 💬 3 · 3 days ago
Trouble Was: A Haunting Look at 1976 Through a Child's Eyes
Charlotte Edwardes, a Guardian journalist, makes her novel debut with Trouble Was. Set during the famously hot summer of 1976, it follows a young boy and his two siblings as they stay with their aunt …
by David Carter · 🦁 4 · 💬 0 · 2 days ago
The sentence I rewrote forty times
I counted once, out of morbid curiosity — forty-one versions of the opening sentence of an essay that eventually ran about grief. Not because I'm a perfectionist. Because the first forty versions were…
by Ella Winters · 🦁 7 · 💬 0 · 3 days ago
The editing pass most writers skip, and it's the one that actually matters
Writers obsess over line edits — better verbs, tighter sentences — while skipping the pass that catches the problems no sentence-level polish can fix: reading the whole manuscript in one sitting, out of order, starting f...
by David Carter · 🦁 6 · 💬 1 · 4 days ago
The freelance pitch mistake that cost me clients before I noticed the pattern
I used to open every pitch email describing my own background and credentials first. Looking back at a year of pitches sorted by response rate, the ones that opened with something specific about the client's work, not mi...
by Sarah Mitchell · 🦁 6 · 💬 0 · 4 days ago
Why 'show don't tell' is the most misapplied rule in fiction
New writers apply "show don't tell" to everything, including the sentences where telling is exactly correct — a character crossing a room doesn't need three paragraphs of showing when one sentence of telling moves the st...
by David Carter · 🦁 6 · 💬 0 · 4 days ago
Remembering Shahrnush Parsipur, Brave Iranian Author
Shahrnush Parsipur, the esteemed Iranian author known for her pioneering feminist fiction, has died at the age of 80. Her work was celebrated for challenging Iran's deeply patriarchal society, cementi…
by David Carter · 🦁 3 · 💬 0 · 3 days ago
Why I make every client read their dialogue out loud, no exceptions
Dialogue that reads fine silently on the page frequently sounds nothing like a real person when spoken aloud, and writers can't hear the difference until they force themselves to actually say the lines out loud in an emp...
by Ella Winters · 🦁 5 · 💬 0 · 4 days ago
The first-line obsession is wasting revision time that belongs elsewhere
Writers spend disproportionate revision time perfecting the opening line, treating it as the single sentence that decides everything. In my experience workshopping manuscripts, the first paragraph matters far more than t...
by Ella Winters · 🦁 5 · 💬 0 · 4 days ago
I deleted my favorite chapter, and the book got better. Here's how I knew
I loved my chapter four more than almost anything else I'd written — a tense confrontation scene I'd rewritten eleven times until every line sang. Cutting it entirely, on an editor's suggestion, felt like malpractice. Th...
by Ella Winters · 🦁 6 · 💬 1 · 6 days ago
Patrice Lawrence: UK's New Children's Laureate on Impact and Inclusion
Patrice Lawrence has recently been named the UK's next Children's Laureate for a two-year term. The author, known for books like Orangeboy, expressed profound shock at the news, now processing her pla…
by David Carter · 🦁 3 · 💬 0 · 4 days ago
The Sedaris Dilemma: Charm Amidst the Curmudgeon
A new collection of essays by David Sedaris, titled *The Land and Its People*, is reviewed, prompting a discussion on the author’s evolving style. While the book reportedly maintains Sedaris’s enterta…
by David Carter · 🦁 4 · 💬 0 · 5 days ago
The scene-and-sequel structure that fixed my saggy middle chapters
Every early draft I wrote had the same problem reviewers flagged independently: a strong opening, a strong ending, and a middle that readers described as "fine" in the specific tone people use when they mean the opposite...
by Ella Winters · 🦁 4 · 💬 1 · 6 days ago
I asked 200 hiring managers what actually gets a resume read. The answers broke every rule I was taught
I surveyed 200 hiring managers across tech, healthcare, and finance. The consensus broke almost every rule I had been taught. The one-page rule is dead for anyone past five years of experience — 71% s…
by David Carter · 🦁 5 · 💬 2 · 10 days ago
Write the ugly first draft: what I learned editing 12 working novelists
In ten years of editing fiction I have worked with twelve writers who actually finish books. They disagree about outlines, mornings versus nights, and whether adverbs are a crime. They agree about exa…
by David Carter · 🦁 6 · 💬 4 · 15 days ago
Why I stopped outlining and started 'discovery drafting' instead
I outlined for a decade because I was taught that pantsing — writing by the seat of your pants — was for amateurs. Then I noticed my outlined books all had the same flaw: the middle sagged, exactly wh…
by David Carter · 🦁 3 · 💬 1 · 9 days ago
The email template that got me 4 freelance clients in a month
Cold pitching used to terrify me, so I studied every reply I ever got and found a pattern: the emails that worked were short, specific, and about them, not me. The template has three sentences. First:…
by Sarah Mitchell · 🦁 6 · 💬 0 · 14 days ago
AI Blurs Lines: Can You Tell Human from Machine Writing?
The literary and media worlds are increasingly confronting allegations of AI use, sparking a crucial conversation about the nature of language. Linguists are stepping forward to clarify the unique qua…
by David Carter · 🦁 0 · 💬 0 · 6 days ago