Writer's Digest

Every writer has one. The half-finished novel hidden in a folder called "Old Drafts." The memoir that stalled after chapter three. The cozy mystery was abandoned during a stressful season of life. Projects often get quietly pushed aside, but the emotions surrounding them are rarely quiet at all. (Creating a Writer's Joy List.) Writers talk openly about rejection, deadlines, and writer's block, yet many do not talk about the strange grief that comes from shelving a project.

Shana Galen is an award-winning writer and bestselling author of over 50 historical romances. Shana taught middle and high school English in Houston’s inner city for more than a decade. She is also dedicated to animal rescue and advocacy. She writes full-time, surrounded by four rescued cats and one spoiled rescue dog. She’s happily married and has a daughter who is most definitely a romance heroine in the making. Follow her on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.

You’ve finished your draft. Congratulations! Now comes revisions, the phase where many writers turn their attention to tightening sentences, cutting filler words, spiffing up their dialogue, and polishing their scenes. The pages get cleaner. The prose gets snappier. (6 Unique Editing Ideas That You've Probably Never Tried.) And yet, something still isn’t working.

Let’s be honest. We’ve all heard the criticism. Feel-good fiction is “fluffy.” It’s “escapist.” It’s not “real literature.” But here’s what I’ve learned after 30 years of writing (and reading!) warm stories that leave readers with full hearts: The best feel-good fiction isn’t shallow at all. It’s deeply human, emotionally complex, and, yes, it takes real skill to craft well. The secret isn’t avoiding the hard stuff. It’s weaving it into something beautiful.

In this conversation, New York Times bestselling author Amy Bloom explores what it means to truly understand the people we write about. Drawing on her background as a psychotherapist and her work in fiction and memoir, Amy discusses observation without judgment, the power of restraint, and the emotional complexity that defines real human behavior.

I am asked at virtually every talk, class, or dinner party I attend—and once, recently, at a funeral (don’t do that)—some version of the same question, usually with a slightly pained expression: Do I really need a platform to sell a nonfiction book? (An Agent's Take on Tackling Queries.) The honest answer is more complicated than any of us would like.

Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He is the author of over 130 articles as well as Moral Psychology (2021) and four books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021).

Fazlur Rahman, M.D.was born and brought up in what is now Bangladesh. After his medical education in Dhaka, New York, and Houston, he practiced cancer medicine for 35 years in San Angelo, Texas. He is an adjunct professor of biology (medical humanities and ethics) at Angelo State University, a senior trustee of Austin College in Sherman, Texas, and an advisory council member of the Charles E.

When I started writing The Forgotten Midwife, I knew I wasn’t just writing one story. I was writing two stories separated by decades, an ocean, and approximately 10,000 family secrets. For me, dual timeline stories are a writer’s dream. The scope is endless. One chapter, a character is lost in New York City with an iced coffee in one hand and Google Maps in the other, yelling at her to turn right at the corner.

Soman Chainani is the author of the School for Good and Evil series, which has sold over 4.5 million copies, has been translated into 35 languages across six continents, and has been adapted into a major motion picture from Netflix that debuted at #1 in over 80 countries. Together, his books have been on the New York Times Bestseller List for more than 50 weeks.