Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Why I Wrote You Are Not Alone: A Heartfelt Guide to Grief, Healing, and Hope
No one is born knowing how to cope with the wave of grief that follows the death of someone we love. As a psychotherapist who’s worked with many grievers, I know when faced with overwhelming grief, many people feel like they are alone in what they’re experiencing and can feel like they’re going crazy. Helen […]
The Acknowledgement Dilemma
As a new writer you spend all of your time and energy getting the story and words of your novel to be the best that they can be. Then comes the hit and miss task of getting your work in front of agents and publishers. When you finally get that break and sign a contract […]
A Lab Of One’s Own, Science And Suffrage In The First World War
Serendipity is my favorite word and my guiding principle for research. Coined by society gossip Horace Walpole in the eighteenth century, it originated from an ancient Persian fairy tale about three princes from Serendib (now Sri Lanka), who travelled in new directions by taking advantage of whatever chance happened to throw at them. About five […]
Basia Briggs on Writing Memoir
Basia Briggs is a luminary of the London social scene and a distinguished fundraiser, having played a fundamental part in the installation of the Queen Mother’s Gate in 1993 and the regeneration of Hyde Park Corner. She has written for various publications including The Telegraph and the Daily Mail. Born in London, she emigrated briefly to Australia before returning to […]
The Minefield They Call Genre
When I started reading adult fiction many years ago nobody ever mentioned the word ‘genre’. Yes, there were novels that tended to be read only by women and others (largely thriller, spy or cowboy stories) that were clearly aimed at men. Crime novels either fell into the cosy Agatha Christie mould or the deeper, darker […]
Why Add The Bad Stuff?
My second published novel, Here Casts No Shadow, explores a number of quite dark themes – war, death, revenge, mental illness and forced displacement. People sometimes ask me – why, when there’s so much sadness in the world, do you have to add to all the bad stuff? We have enough awful news thrown at […]
The Gift of Writing Regularly
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of writing. Thinking is great. Doing is better. To encourage you to keep writing, I’d like to share a few excerpts from an interview Carol Smallwood did with me about my new book, Never Too Late: From Wannabe to Wife at 62. The title says it all, […]
Waiting: A Helpful Guide In Disguise
Alice Tallmadge’s memoir Now I Can See the Moon—A Story of a Social Panic, False Memories and a Life Cut Short, focuses on the disturbing social panic over child sexual abuse that roiled communities across the U.S. (and some in Canada and Great Britain) during the 1980s and into the 1990s. A few years ago, I […]
Why Write?
Like J K Rowling, the big impetus to me getting my first book written – and then published – was poverty. No money, no job on the horizon and a mountain of bills. To put it poetically – or as a story teller would – it was like being a donkey beaten with a big […]
Historical Fiction Is A Piece Of Cake
Historical fiction sounds relatively easy, right? You take an event from history, do a little research to get the appropriate costumes and setting, then add dialogue. Voila! You’ve got historical fiction. Not so fast. I recently wrote a book of historical fiction and I can say honestly that not a single step was easy. My […]
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