Thank you University of Iowa for sponsoring a free online class in fiction writing. Over 8100 global participants – the discussions are rich and varied.

My takeaway, this week.

One difference between a newsletter (to people who like you) and a novel (for people who don’t know you) is that a newsletter writer is the story, while the novelist must get out of the way of the story.

If a newsletter is a toy, a novel is more like a child; you can impose structure and supply building blocks but you, yourself must fade into the background. Do you know what I mean?

My favorite stories read as if written by someone with Asperger’s: brilliant and focused; neither invested nor judgmental.

Professional detachment at its best enables readers to believe they discovered the writer’s world and that every word is what they’d write, if they’d stumbled on the scene.