I think critics who use the phrase "Show, don't tell" are charlatans.

You can possess your readers by mastering only one technique. 

Subtlety allows readers to think something else is going on, something hiding, something faintly suggested.

A common problem beginning authors have when writing in first person is to overuse the word, “I.”

To keep a steady pace, you must keep an unsteady pace.

Central to all human interaction is persuasion.

Why are there numerous sites devoted to Top-10 Movies, Top-10 Fiction Books, and Top-10 NFL players, but none for Top-10 Paragraphs?

It's your job as the author to answer questions, not the reader's.

The rules of English grammar provide us with question marks, exclamation marks, and quotation marks, but no assumption mark.

Reciting tales has been a part of human life from the earliest discovered cave drawings until the present day.

A story that is not relatable is of little use to anyone no matter how clearly it is written.

If you accelerate or decelerate unevenly while driving a vehicle, your passengers will feel jerked around. Don’t jerk your passengers.

When your prose is effective, your readers will become someone else in a different time and place.

If you want to immerse yourself in a creative and unique atmosphere that sends you far away to a distant land, then listen to a soundtrack.

If my mother were to haunt me from the next world (which would be a surprise because she is alive), I know what her incantation would be.

Every author has what literary experts call voice. It took me years to realize that voice simply meant the author's unique writing style.

As you write every sentence of your story, read each one aloud and ask yourself, “Is this sentence easy to read, and is it enjoyable?”

Pieces of your themes must be touched upon repeatedly—wiggled—so your readers will keep in their minds the central messages of your tale.

Before you can successfully break a grammatical or well-established rule of fiction, you must first master the rule.

I’ve read hundreds of websites and more than twenty books meant to help authors write novels. Most of them didn’t help me.

Hiking is like writing fiction. Once you agree with me on this point, your writing will improve. So will your hiking.

Your fans want to know that you know what you’re doing.

With a bit of skewed math, we can squeeze a decent novella out of one thousand sentences.

No one except novelists knows what it’s like to write a novel.