Questions & Quandaries Blog

What kind of writer-bird are you? Gayle Brandeis looks at different species of birds and their nest building techniques and considers how our fine feathered friends’ creative processes might intersect with our own as writers.

Patreon offers creatives a more sustainable model for crowdfunding—ongoing micro-payments from interested benefactors.

Negative reviews of your work can cut deep. Author Pamela Jane offers five proactive measures you can take to stay strong and move forward when dealing with bad book reviews.

Kerri Maher, author of WD Books' This is Not a Writing Manual and the new novel The Kennedy Debutante, offers research advice—or rather, NOT research advice—explaining how diaries, letters and books she read made their way into her fiction.

Kathy Edens finds that she can write content all day every day, but when it comes to fiction, she's terrified of the blank page. Her secret? Scheduling procrastination into her writing schedule.

A healthy relationship between novelist and editor can send your story to heavenly heights, but a poor partnership deserves its own special circle of hell. Longtime writer-editor duo Steven James and Pam Johnson discuss where novelists go astray.

Dana Chamblee Carpenter recalls a panel on which Anne Perry tossed aside the idea that the historical fiction writer had a responsibility to get everything “right.” We’re storytellers, after all, not historians.

If you're writing a graphic novel or a comic, you need to consider how your images and text work together to spin the story. Here are a few ways to play with combining words and pictures in sequential art from author-illustrator Whitney Gardner.

If you want to write a book, for whatever reason, it’s important to know what kind of author you actually want to be so you know what strategy to use to sell books. Vickie Gould explains the difference and why it matters.

The key to successful collaborative writing, from an equal co-authorship to a ghostwritten autobiography, is a good contract that is clear about who has what roles, how rights and burdens are shared, and how to unwind the project if things implode. Here are the key terms your collaboration agreement should cover.

Want to write the best possible book? You need an editor. They are critical for making your writing “tight” and immersive. But before you do, you need to understand when to hire an editor.

Our panel of thriller agents provide their thoughts on the state of the thriller and suspense subgenres and share their own favorite thrillers and what makes them work, along with some crucial advice for querying.

Sometimes we have to look outside of our usual medium to find the motivation we need to get the words on the page—or to just feel like someone else "gets it." Check out these webcomics for writers.

Jennifer Haupt discusses five strategies for finding a good balance between your vital alone time and the benefits of participating in a writing community.

Landis Wade shares 47 tips about writing fiction that he learned in a writing workshop with Craig Johnson, author of the Longmire series that was adapted into a popular TV series.

Discover the three major steps and a slew of free tools to help you format and design an ebook from start to finish, no design skills necessary.

Here, we talk with writers who have taken big writing career risks and how those risks paid off—along with what they learned along the way.

Funny You Should Ask is a humorous and handy column by literary agent Barbara Poelle. In this edition, she answers a reader's question about the best times to query a literary agent.