Grinding Through to the Half-Way Mark

The Key to Writing? WORK!Fisherman’s Wharf, Monterey, California

Chapter five of the biography I’m working on turned into a challenge I hadn’t expected. After chapter four, I felt like I was on autopilot, like I’d solved my approach to nonfiction and would be able to apply it to production of the rest of the book. Wrong. The chapter proved to be maddeningly opaque. The harder I tried, the worse it got. And the story lines themselves (violence, murder, treachery, deceit, the usual) weren’t helpi...