This Year You Write Your Novel

1) Write. There is no substitute. Write what you most passionately want to write, not blogs, posts, tweets or all the disposable bubblewrap in which modern life is cushioned. But start small: write a good sentence, then a good paragraph, and don’t be dreaming about writing the great American novel or what you’ll wear at the awards ceremony becaus

some of us writers start out wanting to write excellent fiction (or nonfiction, in my case) and then get stuck because that’s . . . the wrong starting point? At the end of the day, the writing is just a vehicle for something else—some feeling about the world or human experience that you want to suggest or precipitate in your readers.

With sufficient care, that wheelbarrow full of things could become an entire system of meaning, saying truthful things about our world, some of which might have been impossible to say via a more conventionally realistic approach. That system would mean, not by the plausibility or acuity of its initial premise, but by the way it reacts to that premi