When you are ready to start writing this month, remember this. “The water doesn’t flow until the faucet is turned on,” says Louie L’Amour, the pulp novelist of some two hundred novels. Two hundred! C’mon, man!

You’ve got one tool to add a sense of conflict or drama to your writing. Make scenes. That’s it. That’s the tool. You’re going to get conflict in your fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by putting two — forces, people, feelings, desires, longings, losses, figures — in a confined space with opposing, incompatible needs.

I've been teaching at the Attic nearly thirty years now and in MFA programs longer than that. All this time, whenever I reconnect with my own teachers…