A Dash of This and a Pinch of That

All too often, writing advice can come off like a recipe.

No more than three sentences in a paragraph. All paragraphs must be a minimum of three sentences.  

Keep your chapters short. Write at your own pace.

Build a rich world and trust your reader will keep up. Don’t confuse the reader with too many characters.

On and on, the advice goes. And often, pending the workshop you’re sitting in, it can seem like a whole lot of noise and very little help in navigating your work in progress.

The real...