Steven Wingate tackles his process on tackling the next project.

How to make a plan for writing your novel by focusing on not writing your novel.

What is wrong with that story? One of these three common mistakes may be holding it hostage.

Writers are continually told to trim their work down, but is that always the best course of action to follow? Not if you don’t know why.

How does one teach those phenomenal, force-of-nature fiction writing students who walk into a classroom with their own identities? With the expectation that the teacher will change, too, writes Steven Wingate in his latest Quotes and Notes column.

”The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” —Cyril Connolly

“Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.” —Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction

“Stopped hanging other people’s art.”

— a journal entry by Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)

“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.”

– Simone de Beauvoir

“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul’.” –Edgar Allan Poe