Author Archives: Theodora Goss

I think I’ve overdosed on Ricolas. Do you know what Ricolas are? They’re cough drops. You can buy them at a health food store or pharmacy. All day long, I’ve been sucking the kind called Honey-Herb. I thought my cold … Continue reading →

This is one of those weekends. I have a lot of work to do, none of it writing. The work is intellectually rigorous but repetitive, and it’s taken longer than I anticipated. I hope that at some point my life … Continue reading →

We were talking about deliberate practice, and it seemed to me that deliberate practice, for a writer, would involve more than working on sentence or scene structure, for example. It would involve practicing to be creative. So I was thinking … Continue reading →

As I’ve probably mentioned, I’m reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s Letters to a Young Novelist. As I read it, I’ll excerpt passages that I think are important and comment on them. Yesterday I mentioned how helpful I think it is to … Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking about the idea of deliberate practice, and it seems to me that while the idea is certainly a good one, the way it’s described in Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated doesn’t really help writers. Colvin describes deliberate … Continue reading →

I still have a significant amount of work to do this month, but I find myself restless in the way I always do when spring comes and the school year ends. It’s time to clean things up, start things anew. … Continue reading →

I found the strangest thing. I had just deleted the comments that WordPress had identified as spam and was glancing through a list of my blog posts for the last few weeks when I realized there was one I had … Continue reading →