Collected here are entries from my Writer’s Corner series in my newsletter, where I explore the craft, characters, and curiosities behind my stories—one question and answer at a time.
September 23, 2025
Do you edit as you go, or only after finishing a draft?
I think the correct answer is “all of the above.” I do NOT edit word by word and line by line as I go, but I do rearrange scenes, add scenes, and delete scenes as necessary while writing the first draft. Sometimes I do that a second time after I finish the first draft, and for my longer epic novels, I feel like I do that even during the line edits.
I don’t edit on the paragraph/sentence/word level until I’ve got my scenes in the order I want because it’s possible that the paragraph won’t even exist later. Why bother wasting energy on something that eventually won’t exist?
The line-by-line edits come towards the end of the project, while spellcheck and the grammar check come at the very end, right before formatting. I consider this more of a polishing stage. The story needs to be in pretty good shape for me to consider moving on to this stage.
I think a lot of new writers in particular have trouble completing their manuscript because they think that each chapter has to be polished before they move on to the next. To that, I’ll echo what Michael Stackpole said in his podcast, The Secrets: It’s better to have written thirty chapters rather than one chapter thirty times, because at least you have a book at the end of it.
Polishing can always come later.
September 9, 2025
How do you overcome writer’s block?
That’s an apt question for me right now. After I hit “PUBLISH” on Mark of the Dying Light, I’ve kind of been in a funk. Writing, editing, and getting a book ready for publishing is exhausting, so once I’ve finished, it takes a little while to get back into writing. It seems particularly difficult this time for some reason. Maybe it’s the chaos of homeschooling two kids or having a preschooler underfoot all day, or maybe it’s my allergies that make me feel like I’ve got a bad cold that won’t go away, no matter how many antihistamines I take. Regardless, figuring out how to get back to writing has been on my mind lately.
How am I dealing with it right now? A few different things. I’ve ordered some new ink cartridges for my fountain pens so that I can enjoy the tactile element of jotting down notes. I also give myself permission to write anything at all. It doesn’t have to be a project I want to work on—it can be a blurb written from the point of view of a character, or a description of a place I’ve had stuck in my head. I have dozens of Word and Google docs floating around with only a paragraph to a page worth of random scenes or character sketches. Sometimes they go on to become actual characters, and sometimes not.
But my favorite way to combat writer’s block is by using an app called Forest. It’s a simple timer app that rewards you at the end of the allotted time with an animated tree that you “plant” in your forest by staying focused on your goal. If you close the app early, the plant withers and dies. When I’m struggling to write, I usually set the timer for ten or fifteen minutes–just enough to get my creative juices flowing. Nine out of ten times, I completely forget that I’m being timed and keep writing.
But the most important thing is to just write. Make writing fun or comfortable or whatever so that your brain associates writing with positivity instead of negativity, and then just write whatever. Once you get past that initial block, it becomes a lot easier to keep doing what you’re doing.
August 26, 2025
Do you outline your stories or write organically?
I do both. I start out with an outline and then try to follow it. My outlines aren’t the most detailed; some authors plot out their stories down to the scene, but I tend to write “Character X needs to go home and confront Character Y,” or “Major confrontation at Z location with these important plot points.” Then when I get to that point in the outline, I’ll “discovery” write, making sure I hit the important plot points that I need to keep the story going.
But if I come up with an interesting idea while writing, I’ll make changes to the story to accommodate the new idea. I like being able to add in fun details like this because I feel like it adds depth to my story.
I also sometimes write the story according to my outline and then go back and completely retool the story. I don’t even know how many times I rewrote Muspell’s Sons, and Shackles of a Mountain Lord ended up getting massive revisions to the outline at 20%, 50%, and then around 80% (though by that point the changes were less massive than the first two revisions). When I first wrote Mark of the Dying Light, Selen didn’t even exist. I finished the story and it just felt hollow. Keth didn’t change much. This was just another job to him. I went back and added Selen, which brought a lot more character development to Keth and doubled the length of the story.
August 18, 2025
What’s more important: characters or plot?
In the most popular stories, characters and plot both shine.
I try to make characters I care about, then give them a concrete goal like you would find in a plot-based story, and then have them impact their own stories through the choices they make—just as a real person would. In The Wolf Who Stands Watch, Torin Keth starts out as an over-confident new bounty hunter who thinks there’s nothing the galaxy can throw at him that he can’t handle with one arm tied behind his back. That doesn’t last long. The story is about what he does when he realizes he’s not quite as awesome as he thought.
But if I absolutely had to pick either a character-based story or a plot-based story, I’d pick a character-based story because we humans love the drama that we cause each other. Even with a bland plot, dynamic characters can bring an age-old tale to life once more.