Say no to other people telling you what to write. Say yes to experimentation and glorious failure!

You're never going to stop having doubts, but you can learn to live with them and even figure out how to use them to be more productive.

Talent is just the word we use when we don’t understand the process of success and maybe we don’t want to believe it. Talent is the word I hear people use when they want me to agree with them that they could never do what I’ve done. But that’s not true. If you want to be a writer and sell to a national audience, you can do that. There’s a path that will take you there if you follow it.

But writers are important to society. Stories are important. Not everything that matters in life is about money. Or even food. There are deeper needs. Self-expression is one of them, and that is what art is, at its base. People need to see their stories reflected in fiction, and if they aren’t, as is often the case, they have to write those stories themselves.

When you've lived through family/mentors telling you you're not good enough, how do you move on?

Are you a bad person for feeling jealousy when your best writer bud gets a book deal and you don't? No, you're just human.

A story about me writing The Bishop's Wife and why I *needed* to be told not to do it to provide me emotional and psychological cover while doing. What do you *need* to write but are literally too afraid to do it.

How to protect your creativity and say no to others when you need to keep more for yourself. Boundaries and things to do for self-care from exercise to meditation.

Sometimes we have to let go of books we love. Sometimes we have to learn to move on. But before that, it's time to mourn and be gentle to yourself.

No one is a perfect writer. No one wants to read a perfect book. We want raw, vulnerable, authentic writing--and that's messy.