My first book, How To Be a Writer: Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice and Play, focused on the skills writers must use in coming up with material for pieces of writing. But great ideas, scenes, characters, story--they aren't enough to keep people reading your work. You also have to produce excellent writing--that's what agents and editors are looking for.

Many aspiring writers believe only the talented few can produce great sentences. But that isn't true. In the scientific field of expertise studies, researchers have shown that talent has little to do with building expertise; what counts is dedication to deliberate practice. Just like experts in other fields, you can build and develop your skills in writing craft through guided practice and imitating models of excellence.

I developed this skills-building program for students in an MFA program in creative writing. Now, in Spellbinding Sentences, I make it available to writers of all kinds. Here you'll be shown what to practice, and how to practice, as you take one step after another along the path to writing mastery. With mastery comes the confidence that you know what you're doing as you write and revise. That confidence is available to anyone willing to put time and energy into practicing skills.

Spellbinding Sentences is the first book to teach writers how to build their skills the same way musicians and athletes build theirs--according to the proven principles of expertise training.

With Spellbinding Sentences as your guide, you will master the essentials of writing craft. You'll learn how to train, through practice, the part of your mind that comes up with words and arranges them into sentences. As you practice, you'll build your vocabulary and become more aware of what words can do, and you'll expand your repertoire of sentence techniques. The result? You'll become expert at creating powerful sentences--sentences that will grab your readers' attention and keep them turning pages.