Category: Contemporary Women Writers
When Did You Start To Write?
One of the most common questions we writers are asked is ‘when did you start to write?’ and for me this question always raises a smile as the answer takes me back to my childhood when I used to write songs at a very young age and show them to my mother for her approval. […]
From Dream to Reality – My Six-Month Plan to Becoming a Writer
Ten years ago I had just begun an undergraduate degree at Oxford in Mathematics. My days were spent solving differential equations and making linear algebra summary pages. So if you’d said then that in ten years time I would be writing this blog post on publishing my debut novel Puzzle Girl I would probably have […]
Why Would a Woman Write a Male Protagonist?
A few weeks ago, I found my carefully honed work/childcare balance compromised when some emergency editing came up and I had to take a (generally preserved for mothering) Friday to do it. A woman I had not met before stepped in as babysitter and at some point asked about my novel. ‘Is it about […]
How to Prevent Your Characters from All Sounding the Same
At the start of my career I had a book rejected because the commissioning editor didn’t feel my characters were ‘coming across’. I think she was trying to find a polite way of saying they were flat and dull – ‘cardboard’ characters, if you like – which is about the worst thing you can say […]
When The Words Won’t Come
Sometimes I can’t stop writing. Sometimes the words tumble out of me like some writhing, living beast that refuses to be contained. Where the story emerges, almost unbidden, and it’s all I can do for my fingers to keep up with the rapid pace of my mind. Suddenly the dreaded white page is covered in […]
Why Won’t (Insert Name Here) Read My Book?
So you wrote the book, which is an amazing accomplishment. You published the book, which is another accomplishment. You also dug in and did your marketing homework and set up a great plan to connect with those readers, and began to get some good reviews, and began to get some sales. Now comes the part […]
Eight Ways To Make Your Writing Funnier
“If someone gets a lot of LOLs on their Facebook statuses, do you think they could be a comedy writer? Asking for a friend.” If someone asked me that, I’d go to their Facebook feed and read where theses LOLs were coming from. Of course, his mother. But then I’d cut him a break because […]
The Trouble With Writing About Family
Let us take a tiny moment from our otherwise busy day to think how difficult it must be to be related to a writer. We are not easy people, after all. Many of us are perhaps a bit moody, tense and insecure, and possibly have a slight tendency to scribble dialogue or check our Amazon […]
Q&A with Tiffany McDaniel
Tiffany McDaniel writes with a wholly original beauty that is rarely seen. Arresting. Disquieting. Luminous. This is a sample of reviews from readers. There are a thousand more like them. “I think something deep in my soul has shifted after reading this book. My gut is still churning after turning the final page 2 days […]
How Archival Research Added Texture To My Novel
Let me make this clear from the start: I love the smell and feel of archival documents, those yellowing bits of paper and crumbling photographs that rustle ever so slightly when extracted from their manila envelopes. There’s something magical about scouring through meters of racks, drawers and file folders until you find an interesting or […]
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