Category: Contemporary Women Writers
On Revision: Reframing the House, Painting, and Applying the Finishing Touches
by Jill Caugherty Over ten years ago, in 2008, I began writing my historical novel, WALTZ IN SWING TIME. I had no firm plans other than to base the story loosely on my grandmother’s life and learn from my mistakes with an earlier shelved autobiographical manuscript. Little did I realize that the novel would morph […]
Kat Gordon: On Writing
When I first read about Alice de Janzé I was looking for a way into my novel. I’d recently come back from travelling and working in East Africa, and I knew I wanted to write about it. I wanted to write about a sun that grew so hot that we’d rise at 5am to start […]
A Gift For You — Holidays For Writers
Where are you in your writing life? Looking for a good idea? Slogging through that first draft? In the glory of revisions? Here’s the gift. You have already gotten the holiday present you always wanted. Remember when that idea came to you? The seductive, encircling beginning of the possibility that you, just like you always […]
High Expectations Kept Me From Seeing My Success
“When did you first consider yourself a writer?” The question came from a writing coach facilitating an online group class. After considering this, the answer was fuzzy. “Two…maybe three years, after I published my book?” The teacher’s eyes widened as the rest of the class looked on, each face staring out from individual video squares […]
On Finding The Right Writing Advice
In his poem ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’, Dylan Thomas tells of his writing being ‘Exercised in the still night / When only the moon rages / And the lovers lie abed.’ It’s a seemingly perfect image – a writer, scribbling away at a desk set before a window, his ink drying under a […]
Inspiration For The Silence
The Silence began as a story about my experience of living and working in Sydney in the late nineties. More specifically, my experience of failing to love Australia, while my ex-pat friends were excited and amazed, desperate to stay, to see more. It wasn’t Australia, it was me. I knew this as I followed the […]
Genre Hopping
I am a genre hopper. There. I said it. My first novel, Trouble the Water, is historical fiction, and my second, That’s Not a Thing, is contemporary. People keep asking me how this can be, how one author can inhabit two different spheres? But isn’t this the story of what we, as women, do so […]
From Rejection To Publication
I’m 54 years old and very proud of my age. It’s the time in my life where I feel most comfortable with me and who I am. It’s taken me a long time to get to this place where I think life is just what it is…it’s just life…just live it. I’ve been writing for […]
Sometimes You Have to Stumble
On New Year’s Eve, My Own True Love and I stood in the main square in Salzburg and waited for the countdown to midnight to begin. It was raining, an icy drizzle that occasionally opened up into something more. The square was crowded with happy drunks. Not my favorite combination. But dancing in the square […]
What Your Younger Self Can Teach You About Writing
We’ve all done those self-actualizing and inspirational exercises where we write a letter to our younger self, haven’t we? Where we look back at our frazzled crazy teenage personas, and wish we could tell them to relax, or stop worrying, or focus on the big picture instead of who has the best hair or whether […]
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