Building a supportive network takes time and courage. Novelist Katrin Schumann argues that it’s worth starting to cultivate community early on, even if your instinct or your preference is to work alone. This post first appeared on JaneFriedman.com.

I’ve always found people who make movies to be awe-inspiring—in order to evoke a world and a story on screen, they need to work together with dozens of other professionals, from front-end people like actors and directors, to back-end people like sound editors

In this post GrubStreet Instructor, Ben Berman, uses his daughters’ relationship with the moon to discuss the ideals of Romanticism and Modernism.

My older daughter has always been transfixed by the moon.

When she was a baby we would sit on the back porch and watch it rise over our neighbor’s house. She would clap her hands wildly and rub her chest please, begging me to climb into the night sky and retrieve it for her.

Katrin Schumann explores what it's really like for authors in the months before launching a new book into the marketplace.

A book launch is a prolonged, and frankly rather strange, experience. You've already been working for what seems like ages (and sometimes is ages) on a manuscript. Eons pass as you prepare that manuscript for the reality of a commercial marketplace: editing, cover design, interior design, more editing, acknowledgements, nightmares about who you've forgotten to acknowledge, and diving into promotional activities. Your book--it's themes, characters, the whole point of it--seems far away now. It's become a product, one ...

In this post, GrubStreet Instructor Ben Berman thinks about the importance of both praise and scrutiny when participating in writing workshops.

It was my four-year-old’s first day at her new school and she was clinging to my leg so tightly that I was beginning to lose circulation. Don’t leave me, she kept saying, as though I was abandoning her at an orphanage.

In this post, GrubStreet Instructor Ben Berman models the process of how journaling and free writing can help you figure out the subject beneath your subject.

It’s two in the morning when your five-year-old wakes you up and tells you that her belly is too full to sleep.

Try lying on your left side, you say. But she insists that she is going to be sick.