"But now that I've written that dialogue, I know how to make it better."
"I've had a great brainstorm, but Marge has to be in her 20s and just starting her career, not the 40 year-old director she is in the first couple of chapters."
"I'm going to go back and change the setting to Guam, the whole thing will work better."

Don't go back and revise. Make a note in the margin or at the bottom of the page ("more details of the train ride... drunk teenager enters second stop") and keep going.

Why...

Rule #1 is: 500 words/day.

Nothing happens unless you do this one. It's the sine qua non bedrock of getting a novel done.

Writing a novel is a long slog. If you don't keep after it, it will get away from you. Novel writing is a not a burst of inspiration. It's a lifestyle.

You can write more than 500 words. Stephen King locked himself in his writing room in the morning and didn't come out until he had 1,000 words. When he was young, on good days, he said he might finish up in a couple of...

Hello. I used to teach at Writers and Books in Rochester NY, and spent a couple of years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. This entry is for folks who are starting to write fiction and looking for advice and ideas to steal.

Let's start with this: there are no rules in art. That said, there are a lot of things that don't work. These two thoughts live together. They balance each other like yin and yang, like Lennon and McCartney, like liver and onions.

But before we go further, a couple of...