There is nothing more sustaining to long-term creative work than time and space – and these things cost money

1. Dragon Naturally Speaking by Nuance. Dragon is pretty much the gold standard for dictation. And Nuance seems to have invented the entire industry before dictation was cool. They have deep roots in medical transcription, for example. Die hard dictators swear by the PC version of this software. The Macintosh version was (puzzlingly) discontinued last year. Since Dragon has such a big reach, lifelong Mac users have been known to purchase cheap PCs to run this software.

Barbara Linn Probst delves into the very heart of your novel: its "About-ness." Learn the questions (and answers) that help your story resonate deeper with readers.

As a culture, we often fetishize the debut writer as some sort of self-arising wunderkind, someone that comes “out of nowhere” or had “splashed onto the scene” unannounced, seemingly without a pre-…

Free guides, podcasts and interviews about writing. Featuring Margaret Atwood, Nicci French, Tim Clare, Elizabeth Haynes, Mark Dawson, Joanna Penn and more!

When I learned “show, don’t tell,” I thought I’d discovered a guide that would never fail me. And sure, it was good for me, in the way training wheels help in learning to ride a bike. The directive…

How millennial novelists are confronting the challenging of representing our text habits in fiction

“All suggestions can be ignored when necessary,” says the best-selling author, but ignore them at your own peril. (And put away that thesaurus.)