Moving the chains

Over at Writers in the West, Jim Thomsen started a thread on what separates those who are serious about writing from those who are dilettantes. The biggest difference: Writers write. It sounds simple, but that’s the crux of it.

A novel isn’t born by sitting down and bleeding out 80,000 or 100,000 words. It’s hundreds of cases of sitting down and chipping away — a thousand words here, 25 hard-to-extract words there, going back over your work and rewiring passages that just don’t add up, removing w