When students ask me what's the most important advice I can give them about writing, I usually say two things: (1) Write your next book as if it's the only one (or the last one) you'll ever write; and (2) Write the book only you can write.

My first novel, The Nexus, came to me in furious rushes of story and I wrote it without an outline. Here's how.

I've never been to Singapore and/or Borneo, or to any other place in Asia, and when people ask me about the book, and discover this is so, they seem bewildered. As in: How can you write about a place you've never seen or been to?

I retired from psychiatry and began writing fiction -- full-time. I'll soon to be 71 and am finally doing what I always wanted: writing heart-pumping thrillers. It's never too late to live the dream.

A writing retreat could be just what you need to start that novel, finish your chapbook of poetry, or revise the short story you've been meaning to send out. So how do you manage a writing retreat, especially if time and money are scarce?

Keep the back story sparse and sprinkle it throughout your book instead of front loading. That way, your narrative tension will be tight instead of slack, and your reader will be drawn forward by wanting to know the story behind the story.

What is a synopsis, anyway? Just a summary, right? Wrong. Sure, a synopsis is a summary of your novel's narrative arc and describes the main characters. However, a synopsis must also be its own entity, with dramatic turns and a clear beginning, middle, and end.

Whether you drafted a new novel in November for NaNoWriMo or you're in the middle of a multi-year writing project, one key task in revising your book will be to comb (or machete) your way through it to see whether the imagery is as fresh and original as possible.

The surest way to kill the aliveness of our characters is by insisting that they always make sense. When we follow the labyrinth of most conversations, we discover one constant: people always want something.

I think it's odd when writers say "I write from 6 a.m. to noon" or "I only write on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays." Writing isn't something you can turn on and off.

From Writer's Relief staff: If you are dipping your toes into the sometimes-tumultuous waters of fiction writing for the first time, you might be ...

Must a novelist, whose task often is to mine the jumble of life's experiences, disguise plot and characters so that no one is offended? My answer is an emphatic "no."

When my agent called a few weeks ago to say that an editor at Penguin wanted to buy my new novel, The Wishing Hill, I literally had to lie down. I've been waiting for this call for 25 years.

The appropriation of a piece of literature to a certain genre is a process descriptive of the political moment in which the text finds itself; it's indicative of what's permitted to be described as fact in a particular cultural atmosphere, whether it's intended to be or not.

This week's advice tackles the craft of writing fiction. Whether you're secretly aiming to be the next J.K. Rowling or you just dabble with fiction in your spare time, here are five ideas that will serve you well.

Who would have thought it? To live a life of words spilling out of the mind, out of the heart onto the page and into the eyes of invisible strangers. ...

It is indeed a mystery and a marvel that fiction writers can fool their readers into believing in what they write. And it isn't only geography that we novelists can "fake."

Like all dreams, it's hard to know exactly when this one started. Maybe it was the day way way back in April of 1985 when I walked away from a plum job as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York, pushing my infant daughter Jocelyn in her carriage.

"How are you going to make money writing fiction on a blog?" That's the question my guitar teacher asked me last night, when I told her how thrilled ...

A writing MacGuffin seems like the most important thing in the world, but it is a meaningless distraction from the real issue: fear.