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If you have never worked in a restaurant, you may have heard it's like a ballet, or at least a noisy play. In the kitchen, the pans sizzle. In the dining room, the servers dance. I spent a decade of my life immersed in the vibrant ambiance of restaurants, an experience that left an indelible mark on my storytelling.

The man at the bank has a gun. The girl is about to tell the man of her dreams she loves him, the child is about to fall from a cliff. Aliens contact earth. The fundamental concept of plot boils down to the sequence of events within the story. It's not an account of what happened; it's a cause and...

When my daughter was two years old, still grasping at the concept of creating her own stories, she still understood their power. I know this because she would sit on her bed at story time, hold the book in her lap unopened, and turn to myself and her mother saying, "scary story." She would annunciate the scary, elongating the...

Your first draft is not your final draft.

My three-year-old tells me stories about crocodiles. She loves them. Not as though she wants one as a pet, but she loves using them as villains.

Which may seem weird because I don't really write fantasy. But magic systems are much more than just magic. A magic system envisions the richer, deeper roots of the world and explores how each root connects beneath the surface of the story.

Can you learn anything from reading the classics?