This month at the DeadDarlings offices, we looked at vulnerabilities in characters and ourselves that manifest in our fiction. Here are some common stages in crafting a novel that every writer struggles through:

Research: Finding What Drives Your Story
Jerry Whelan explains how his fascination with long-dead New England abolitionists and digging for his own ancestral roots combine in his fiction in DNA, Memory and Fiction as Magic: A True Story.

Revise: Writing Realistic Characters
Laura Roper suggests Exploring Character Through Memoir as a way to guide them to reveal themselves in direct and indirect ways, intentionally vs. unintentionally ...

I like to play with my poems the way I play with my daughters.

We invent elaborate games with ever-shifting rules. We treat familiar objects as if they were not familiar. When we wrestle, it almost looks like we’re dancing.

The problem, though, is that other poems – poems I’ve never even read before – love to run over and join in on the fun, start trying to grab my thumb or pull the glasses off my face and before I know it I’m surrounded by a pack of little rough drafts all wanting to play slappy-slappy.

  ...

The January 2018 edition of "Writing Life Essentials," a monthly hand-curated list of contests, grants, scholarships, submissions calls, and awards, with a focus on opportunities that are at least one of the following: local, free to apply, and/or committed to celebrating and supporting writers from historically marginalized communities

In the January 2018 edition of "Best of Boston," we bring you our top Boston lit events this month, most curated from the Boston Literary District's event calendar, an essential source of literary goodness.

By Katrin Schumann

I write a lot about writers’ insecurities because for 99.9 percent of us, fear lurks behind the brave faces we put on. Depending on where we are in our careers, we may all be afraid of different types of failures, but these deep-seated anxieties rarely go away completely.

Most artists learn to live with fear—and some learn to use it to drive toward better work. I might even dare to say that if you don’t experience doubt or fear, you should be worried. Overconfidence usually doesn’t serve writers well.