After a year, the time has come for a slight course correction for ColeWriting.com. When this blog was begun I was just entering a new phase of my writing life and was focused on freelance magazine writing. While this was a wonderful step to take - writing full-time for online and print magazines...

I was a media escort. With those five words, John McNally begins his fictional biography of Jack Hercules Sheahan, a once promising graduate of “The famous Iowa Writers Workshop”. Jack, is suffering one of the greatest bouts of writers-block and underachievement to come out of The Workshop since its founding in 1939. For those...

Recently I have been reading Anne Perry's early books and trying to discern the secrets of her popularity and longevity as a writer. Perry published her first Victorian detective novel when she was 39 years old and has since published more than 50 books. The amazing thing is that not one of her books...

I was writing. All kinds of things: articles, letters, amusing emails (my curse), and of course blog posts. Yet I was not finishing my novel. At the time, I happened to be in the library and picked up a biography about Raymond Carver. Carver is arguably the best short-story writer the U.S. ever produced....

Question: How much structure does a writer need? Answer: Just enough to get the writing done. Okay, that may be a bit flippant, but the point is that writing is a creative activity and some writers will require a lot of structure in their life and projects and others will require just a little...

Recently I returned from a vacation of sorts. I live in the misty chill of the San Francisco Bay Area – on an island near San Francisco actually – but once a year I make a pilgrimage to Utah to ski with some high school friends from Florida. Florida and snow skiing seems a...