The Art and Craft of Writing (or, the worst and best advice you’ll ever get as an author)

I’ve recently been invited to talk to a few writing groups, about the experience of transitioning from a reader, to a budding writer, to a published author. This column comes as a result of thinking about that journey, from the advice I gave and the questions I answered, plus a few interesting discoveries on the internet I made along the way.

First, for funsies, it seems like we keep telling ourselves the same stories. In a recent study, researchers have fed numerous books to a machine...