Don't miss out, here's everything happening this week at Grub!

Multi-Week Classes at Grub HQ: 

• Writing the Smart Page-Turner!, Starts January 23rd
• Jumpstart Your Novel, Starts January 24th

Last year, I didn't make any New Year's resolutions. Frankly, I was tired of pushing myself so hard, and I thought: hey, how about I just try my best this year? It felt like a gentle enough goal given that I had just started a new job and my first novel was about to be published. While I knew quite a bit about what was ahead (I'd published nonfiction before), I had very little idea about whether the outcome for this book would be good, bad or indifferent, and how I would end up feeling about it all

If your New Year's resolution is to write a lot more than you did this year, then don't miss out on these January 3-hour seminars and 6-hour weekend workshops:

Friday, 1/10 & Saturday, 1/11

• Personal Stories for Public Change: Election Year
• Touchy Feely: How to Get Emotional Without Making a Mess
• So You Want to Be a Writer in 2020? Section A
• Overcoming Writer's Block

Friday, 1/17 & Saturday, 1/18

• Interior Landscapes: Creating Depth in Fiction
• Novel Essentials: Pacing
• Building a World from the Ground Up
• The Mechanics of Powerful Prose
• Jumpstart ...

In the past few years, I've done an enormous amount of editing. I work as a manuscript consultant and help other writers develop their books, and I've (almost completely) rewritten two novels. Here are some of the things I've learned about the editing process:

TOP FALSE ASSUMPTIONS EDITING CLIENTS MAKE

1. An editor will "fix" your manuscript. (An editor can help you fix it.)

In this post, GrubStreet Instructor Ben Berman reflects on the importance of flexible thinking during the creative process.

On the very same day that my older daughter was born, my grandmother died. I have always wanted to write about this but for some reason I have never been able to figure out how.

At first, I thought it might lend itself to a philosophical meditation on liminality and what it means to simultaneously navigate birth and death or perhaps some sort of spiritual piece on the deep connections between generations.

The problem, though, was that the ideas ...