Recently, I took my mom to see The Great Gatsby. As we watched the scene where Nick is asleep on the couch, wan and pale and surrounded by manuscript papers, Mom leaned over to whisper, "I bet that's how you looked when you finished your novel."

She was...

A few years ago, there was a period in my life when I was flying to South Carolina every month to help my mom care for my grandmother and my father. My grandmother was blind and completely dependent on my mother; my dad was on oxygen full-time and becoming frailer...

Seven years ago, my husband and I bought a house that we dubbed Big Red because everything about it was exactly that: Red siding, red shutters, red doors, red trim.

The house is a classic New...

I love hearing authors read aloud, especially when they talk about the genesis of their work or the craft of writing it.

This past weekend, I was lucky enough to hear a presentation at the Newburyport Literary Festival by Barbara Shapiro, author of The Art Forger, a...

A week ago, I did something stupid: I ran upstairs carrying an armload of laundry and a cup of hot tea while talking on the phone. Yep, efficiently multitasking. At the top step, though, I tripped and went flying headlong into the door frame at the top of the stairs....

My daughter was scheduled to leave for California the day after the bombings in Boston. We live about 40 miles north of the city; my son works in downtown Boston, so my daughter and I drove down to have lunch with him before she left to fly across the country.

My husband just came up to the spare bedroom I recently started using as my office to ask a question about taxes. He took one look at the bed buried under my books and papers and raised an eyebrow. I held my breath, waiting to hear what he had to...

I love working on the porch behind my house on Prince Edward Island because there are sheep on the farm below. There is something so simple and pleasing about the way the sheep graze together, drifting in a slow white cloud across the grass, that my mind literally feels like...

It's easy to feel insignificant. That's what I was thinking when I was asked by a local library to speak with authors Myfanwy Collins and J.R. Reardon this past Saturday about women writers in honor of Women's History Month.

Actually, my very first thought when the librarian contacted...

One of the best ways to elevate a book -- no matter what the genre -- from merely good to truly great is to sniff out stale images and replace them with fresh ones.

Recently, for instance, I've been immersed in the work of Andrew Taylor, a British...

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

This week, my son had a CT Scan at Children's Hospital. He is 15 years old, a sophomore in high school who has just experienced his...

My first day at the AWP Conference in Boston, I stood for several minutes at the bottom of the escalator, paralyzed by the sight of so many writers swarming upstream like fish to uncertain habitats. I could almost see the thought bubbles accompanying them:

"Is the physical book dead?"

"Will...

I work in a barn. As in, I literally work in an office in the barn behind our house. Built before the Civil War, our barn has everything you might expect: giant white pine support timbers, hand-carved wooden pegs, an ancient apple cider press and a pig sty underneath. Oh,...

Whether you're a self-published writer or published by a traditional house, the word on the street is the same: Blog like your life depends on it if you want to sell any books. But does blogging really equal book selling?

Not exactly. Last month, for instance, I was fortunate...

After writing five novels without selling any of them, I lost heart. What was I doing wrong? I had sold many articles and essays to national magazines. I had a terrific agent (and still do). I was a ghost writer...

Recently, I heard about a woman being gored by a rhino in South Africa. She was in a safari park when a guide suggested that she stand closer to the rhino for a photograph. Immediately afterward, the animal gored her and flung her into the air.

"Poor woman,"...

As I write this, I'm in a house on the tip of Cape Ann in the dead of winter, in a place where I don't know a soul. I couldn't be happier. I'm on a writing retreat.

Whether you're a working mother like me, a new college graduate, a...

A confession: I have never done meditation, yoga, hypnosis, walking on hot coals or any other practices aimed at unleashing mental powers. I get my best ideas for writing while walking the dog. One of my Buddhist friends refers to this as my "walking meditation," but it's really more of...

Most of us become novelists because we don't envision moments. We envision worlds.

Novelists must fully inhabit those worlds to write about them. We don't just need to know what our characters are doing right now. We must understand who these people were before facing the conflicts we throw their...

I've been writing fiction for a long time. As in, forever. I was one of those kids who read novels inside my regular textbooks in school, and by college I was sending stories to magazines.

Despite deciding to become a doctor and majoring in biology, I kept writing,...