​Between writing camps, plot has long been a contested concept — sometimes treated less as a craft tool and more as a philosophical fault line. On one side are writers who believe stories should emerge organically from character, voice, and situation rather than be engineered through predefined structures. Stephen King famously champions this view, arguing that “story” arises naturally when characters are placed in meaningful conflict, and that heavy-handed plotting risks flattening authenticity into formula. For many writers — especially those drawn to literary, character-driven work — plot can feel artificial, even manipulative, as if it imposes order where intuition and discovery should lead. And yet, most finished novels that resonate deeply with readers still rely on an underlying architecture of change, consequence, and momentum — whether the author consciously planned it or not. 

For years, my mother was openly unsupportive of my writing. At one point, she summed it up by saying, “It’s not the type of writing I like to read.” There’s a great deal that could be unpacked in that statement, but for the purposes of this post, it’s enough to understand it as a declaration of preference—one that seemed, at least to her, to fully explain why she had never engaged with my work. Regardless of intent, the message landed the way these moments so often do for writers: this thing that matters deeply to you does not matter to me.
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If you’re a writer whose family doesn’t support your work—in spirit or effort—this may sound painfully familiar. Often, the hurt isn’t loud or dramatic. It shows up quietly: disinterest, avoidance, jokes about “real jobs,” or an insistence that your writing simply isn’t to their taste. Over time, that quiet dismissal can erode confidence, dampen motivation, and make you question whether the work is worth continuing at all.
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It is.

Every January, writers feel a familiar pull. New year, new goals, new energy—and often, a quiet urge to finish—or abandon—whatever they were working on before. The unfinished manuscript starts to feel heavy. The half-revised draft feels flawed by association. Surely the fresh start must involve a fresh story. From an editor’s perspective, this impulse is understandable—and almost always unnecessary.
 
One of the most persistent myths in creative culture is that progress requires reinvention. That momentum comes from starting over. That if a story hasn’t “clicked” yet, the problem must be the story itself. But after years of working with writers across genres and stages of their careers, I’ve seen a different truth emerge: forward movement usually comes not from replacing the work, but from recommitting to it with a fresh perspective.
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The new year doesn’t demand a new story. It asks for a new relationship with the one you’re already telling.

As the year winds down, I find myself rereading margins, editorial letters, and revision notes—not to tally word counts or deadlines met, but to notice patterns. When you work closely with hundreds of manuscripts across genres, something interesting happens: individual stories begin to echo one another. Not in plot or voice, but in struggle. In hesitation. In the same questions writers quietly ask between drafts.

This year reminded me that storytelling is less about mastering a set of rules and more about learning how to listen—both to the work on the page and to yourself as a writer. Across novels, memoirs, essays, and nonfiction projects, a few lessons surfaced again and again. These are the insights I’m carrying forward into the next year, and the ones I hope writers will take with them too.

Every holiday season reminds me that family gatherings exist for two reasons: food, and unintentionally gifting writers enough story material to last until next December (ha). But seriously, if you’re a writer attending a holiday gathering and you aren’t mentally filing material away for your next book, are you even doing the holidays right?  

​The holiday season has a way of heightening everything—joy, nostalgia, tension, longing, unresolved conflict, even the quiet griefs that typically stay tucked beneath the routines of daily life. Whether you’re writing fiction or memoir, December’s sparkle-and-shadow combination offers an irresistible creative entry point into family drama. People are gathering. Traditions return. Old wounds test their bandages. And amid the glow of twinkle lights, characters (including ourselves) often reveal who they are with startling clarity.

Few topics spark more spirited debate among fiction writers than the question of plotting versus "pantsing" — planning a story in advance versus discovering it as you write. Plotters often value structure, foresight, and narrative cohesion, while pantsers prize intuition, spontaneity, and the feeling of uncovering a story from the inside out. Both approaches are grounded in legitimate creative instincts, and both have produced powerful, lasting novels. The friction arises not because one method is inherently superior, but because writers often mistake a process preference for a craft philosophy — treating the way a story is written as evidence of how it ought to work on the page.

Magical realism has long held a shimmering corner of the literary world — a place where wonder slips quietly into the everyday, and where the impossible is treated not as spectacle but as truth. Writers who step into this space discover a genre that invites subtlety, metaphor, cultural resonance, and emotional depth. It’s a space where magic isn’t a disruption but a companion; where characters don’t gasp when miracles occur, because the world has always held more beneath its surface than logic can explain.

Supernatural fiction has always lived at the crossroads of what we know and what we feel. It’s the place where everyday life brushes against the impossible—where ghosts linger at the edges of our grief, where witches navigate both spellcraft and the PTA, where a mysterious stranger at the bar may literally be older than civilization.

It’s a genre packed with possibility, and it shares deep creative DNA with magical realism: both bend the rules of the natural world to illuminate something true about the human experience. Yet supernatural fiction brings a deliciously heightened sense of stakes, power, danger, and transformation—which is why so many readers flock to it when they want drama with emotional punch.

Like many 80s and 90s kids with a flashlight and an overactive imagination, I was obsessed with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Those eerie black-and-white illustrations by Stephen Gammell were nightmare fuel in the best way—and Alvin Schwartz’s simple, rhythmic prose made every story feel like something whispered at a slumber party you shouldn’t have attended. What struck me then, even before I understood it, was how those stories worked on both the mind and the body: the suspenseful pauses, the perfect pacing, the way dread coiled tighter with every page until you were both terrified and thrilled. That book taught me early on that fear, when crafted well, isn’t just about what happens—it’s about how it feels. It made me fall in love with horror as an art form, long before I ever thought about writing or editing it myself.

For writers exploring how to publish a book, the publishing landscape has never been more open—or more overwhelming. Since Amazon revolutionized the industry with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) in 2007, the book publishing landscape has evolved at breakneck speed, and self-publishing has become one of the biggest forces shaping how authors produce and distribute books. In recent years, the number of independently published titles has skyrocketed: in 2023 alone, more than 2.6 million self-published books were released in the United States, while traditionally published titles numbered around 563,000 (Publishers Weekly)—a clear sign of how prolific independent authors have become.