A good writer is a good researcher. Most writers have heard that good writers write what they know. But, aside from writing your personal memoir, how else do you expect to know your subject? Researching your topic, and I mean characters, setting, plot lines, era, you name it - it all takes a lot of work and diligence.

I’m talking to my 18-year old self. I’m coaching her writing. When I edit work I wrote decades ago, I feel like I’m communicating with the past. It’s a weird, special and sometimes cringeworthy feeling. But it’s a bit otherworldly.

As a writer, do you embody one character more than another? What famous characters do you feel were written more in the voice of their creator? Dialogue is difficult to write and one character may lean in your voice more than another.

Stephen King writes 2,000 words a day at minimum. That’s half a million per year. Is it really just volume that makes writers good? I think it has a big part to play. Imagine if you hit half a million tennis balls a year? You’d likely improve your game. Or how about if you played half a million hours of video games? That’s impossible, but you get my drift.

Creating an author brand is both exciting and nerve wracking. But what does it even mean? To be an author is to be a creator in its most fundamental sense. And that leaves us with creating more than just stories. It leaves us with creating our most essential selves - our brand. And an author brand is deeply personal.

Have you ever opened up a piece of old writing that feels like it’s from another time? Something you penned decades ago that now doesn’t hold up across the expanse of time? Yes, we’re talking a micro-second on the cosmic front, but to you, it contains a relic of a past world that no longer applies?

I’m writing the rom-fi-rama. Is it a thriller, a romantic novel, a sci-fi journey? Perhaps genres, on their own, are too limiting. A novel can be one or many genres at different points of its life.