BLOG | Anna Gates Ha

Morning Words and Magic

In the early morning, the summer air is magnanimously cool. I rise before anyone else is awake. I sit on my little cushion, close my...

Learning to Meditate, Learning to Write a Novel

When I first picked up Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, I was in a pretty bad place. I’d been a mom for about three years, and...

Your Novel's Ground Situation: The Ultimate Plot Test

When writers talk about plot, the conversation tends to center upon inciting incident, rising action, and climax. But a novel’s ground...

For Emotion- and Character-Based Writers: How to Get to the Plot?

For a very long time, when someone asked me what my novel was about, I became really anxious. It didn’t matter if I had two-hundred or...

Creating Emotion on the Page with Oscillation

Like so many other writers, I fell in love with reading at a young age. There were many things that drew me to words, including my love...

To a Writer, Whose Baby Will Not Sleep

Oh, mama. Things haven’t gone as you’ve planned, have they? It’s eleven o’clock at night, and your baby has been screaming for the last...

The Power of Nonrestrictive Elements: An Emotional Guide to Grammar

I am, unequivocally, a sentence girl. I love the craft, the swing, of words that builds to create narration. Most of my experience with...

Using Fear as an Editing Tool

From an evolutionary standpoint, fear is very useful. It was fear—increased heart rate, tense muscles—that allowed our ancestors to...

On Presence & Writing

About a year ago, standing near the cold cut display, I met a woman who said she’d been to infinity and knew the meaning of life. She’d...