"All creativity is an act of play," screenwriter and author Noah Hawley tells The Believer. (If only it always felt that way!) Regardless: "When an idea hits me, I'm like, Oh, I like that, and then what? There are a lot of people who go,

Sayaka Murata’s Japanese publisher offers in-house hotel rooms. Right in the office: a room with a bed, desk, and shower. It's a place for authors to sequester themselves to get a good chunk of work done in isolation. They call it kanzume, or “canning.” You seal yourself

Authors stress about titles. So do agents and editors—it's a never-ending challenge for everyone involved in the publishing process. This is particularly true with advice books, where you need to tell readers how your book will address a perennial problem (weight loss, anxiety, lagging sales, etc.) without

Last time, I wrote about Norman Foster, the architect who doesn't hesitate to junk a good design in pursuit of a great one. Crucially, however, he only starts shredding blueprints after everyone on the team has lived and breathed the project for months. By that point, they all

Norman Foster is an architect. As I writer, I see architects as our closest creative kindred spirits (it's no accident I named my company Bookitect). Authors, like architects, have to design something much too big, complicated, and interconnected to completely envision before putting pencil to paper. An artist

"Originality," wrote the British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, "is not an attempt to capture attention come what may, or to shock or disturb in order to shut out competition from the world." Too often, however, this is precisely what writers striving for originality attempt. Scruton continues:

Have you ever dreamed of writing a nonfiction book? Before diving in, take a moment to visualize the path clearly. Don't let a formless urge to "be published" quietly nag at the back of your mind. Why? Recently, a prospective author reached out for help with

As a music student at Juilliard, composer David Lang was told by a professor to "write some melodies." As Lang later recalled in a conversation with fellow composer Steve Reich: [My teacher] went into my music notebook and drew it in pencil: "Write a melody that goes

Obviously, publishers charge more for thicker books. They cost more to make. It's only fair. That said, the figure we landed on when I was an editor always felt like a guess, at least when working for certain publishers. You know how monkeys throwing darts outperformed professional stock