Valerie Miller

Shutterstock.com 2025 Anastassiya Bezhekeneva Christmas arrives quietly for writers. Not always with bells or music or celebration—but often with tiredness. With the gentle ache of a year spent thinking deeply, imagining lives across decades and continents, holding grief and hope and beauty in your hands like something fragile. Writers of historical fiction, magical realism, and literary fiction carry a particular weight: we don’t just tell stories—we listen to them. We excavate memory. We...

This blog post started life as an email I sent out recently, but I had so much more to say on the topic that I couldn’t resist turning...

Being aware of what your inner critic is trying to do will reduce their effect on you as a writer.