Category: Contemporary Women Writers
My Twisty Turny Road to Publication – Susan Crawford
I have always written. When I was a child, I had diaries jam-packed with angst and secrets, and, later, notebooks filled with fairly random thoughts, short-story parts, poetry. Writing was my escape as was reading. It was my therapy, my emotional purging, my joy. When my family exasperated me, an unhappily common occurrence, I would […]
Five Lessons on Writing and Motherhood
When people see me with three young children, they assume I’m a full-time housewife. On the other hand, writer friends are often surprised when I tell them I have three kids. On March 6th, 2018, my debut novel, RAINBIRDS, came out. I first wrote it for NaNoWriMo in 2013. At that time, I already had […]
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A PLOT OR CHARACTER HITS TOO CLOSE TO HOME?
My father and I have had a tenuous relationship at times so when my first novel captured the painful feelings of my protagonist losing her father at the age of four, my own father immediately went on a tirade: “You killed me off on page 3?” And when my ex-boyfriend from high school’s mother cornered […]
Hold the Lecture and Keep Book Pages Turning
There are few things worse than being lectured by a novelist when you want to be entertained. That’s not to say entertaining fiction can only be happy and inconsequential. Both of my historical novels address weighty events in U.S. history – slavery and environmental ruin, discrimination and economic disaster. When weaving a tale with subject […]
Music, Writing, And Novel Soundtracks
The most frequent question that people ask me when I tell them I’m a writer is, ‘Where do you get your inspiration from?’ It’s a valid query, given that writing a novel requires discipline and imagination. To be honest, inspiration can come from anywhere and at any time, and, being a writer, nothing is wasted. […]
What I’ve Learned Since Getting a Publishing Contract
There are many things I didn’t know before I had a publishing contract. Like publicity is largely self-generated, that social media would rise as it has, I didn’t anticipate how the second book would be so much easier and enjoyable and… I didn’t know they would be so little time to write. I imagined a publishing contract […]
Hannah Fielding: A Writing Q&A
Do you write full-time? Yes, whenever possible I write Monday to Friday and even at week-ends when I can get away with it. I have been doing so for some six years now, since I signed a publishing contract for my debut novel. For years before that, I yearned to write full time, but my […]
Location! Location! Location!
This may sound like an intro for a real estate ad, but not this time. Rather it’s an intro to considering the importance of location in stories. The sense of ‘place’ is often vital to the heart of a novel and, speaking from a personal perspective, it’s absolutely essential to the stories I want to […]
How Writing a Memoir Reshaped My Approach to Fiction
My memoir Sweet Hell on Fire was written about a year in my life when I worked at a prison. It was the darkest time to date, and the most transformative. When I started writing, I thought it would be—if not easy—a rather straightforward process. Just write down the facts, right? The recounted events already […]
Galveston Gal Practices What She Preaches
Growing up in Galveston, I always had something to write about: the beach, the hurricanes, the people. I always had people encouraging me to write, as well, Ball High teachers like Mari Allmond and Mary Pennington, the latter of whom required me to enter one writing contest after another. Each contest won inspired the next, […]
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