Aprildavila

The moment a story grows past the borders of a single book, a whole new set of worries arrives.

How much of the first book do you carry into the second?

How do you keep new readers from getting lost without boring the ones who have been with you all along?

And when it comes time to sell the thing, do you pitch the whole sweep of i...

I don’t usually spend a lot of time describing what my characters are wearing. Most of the time, I trust readers to fill in those blanks for themselves.

But sometimes clothing matters. Maybe she’s wearing the dress she bought for her wedding, even though she isn’t getting married. Perhaps he’s still in his work clothes at midnight because he hasn’t b...

There is a particular kind of paralysis that hits writers at the threshold of querying. You have the manuscript. You have the agent list. And somewhere on your desk sits a query letter that is genuinely pretty good. You cannot make yourself click send. Not because anything is actually wrong, but because some quiet voice in your head keeps insisting that you co...

Every now and then, as writers, we hit a point where the story simply stops. Something has to happen next, nobody knows what it is, and the longer the cursor blinks the more you feel like you’ve lost the thread entirely.

Getting unstuck in moments like that is less about forcing a brilliant idea and more about getting out of your own way. Here’s how ...

I’ve been doing a lot of math around this lately, thinking about what a writing career actually looks like over time. Not the big debut-novel fantasy with the six-figure advance, but the quieter, slower version. The long game of a writing career. The version where you build an audience book by book, and end up with a body of work and a real readership.

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