Category: Contemporary Women Writers
#AmNotWriting
The 4 things that stop Tammy Cohen writing (and how she deals with them) When asked what I do, I tell people I’m a writer. That’s a lie. What I really am is a not-writer. The truth is I spend far more of my time not writing than I do writing. I have no excuse. […]
Plot-driven or Character-driven?
I love reading books about writing. It is my number one displacement activity when I should be working on my novel. However, it bugs me how some how-to books split plot and character. Some books even divide genres into plot-driven and character-driven and say that the plot-driven novels are more likely to be ‘commercial fiction’ […]
Interview with Linda Gray Sexton
Linda Gray Sexton is a novelist and memoirist who lives and writes in San Francisco. In 1994, she published her first memoir, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, in which chronicled her experience growing up as the daughter of poet Anne Sexton. In her second memoir, Half in Love: […]
What is it that makes an idea great?
Where do ideas for novels come from? What is it that makes an idea great? Whatever an author decides to write must be rich enough and thrilling enough to compel their reader through 300-plus pages, to trap them wholeheartedly inside a story, leaving them unable and unwilling to climb out. It must be rich enough […]
From Print to Re-publication
Then… When the intermittent electricity failed in a remote village in rural Bangladesh, I lit a candle stub to continue writing the daily instalment of my journal. I had no idea it would become a book. It was 2002, and my first visit to South East Asia. Back home, my head and heart remained full […]
Writing Advice
Having just turned in my eighth novel in five years, one would hope that I had some writing advice to share with new writers. Giving advice on a process that is a little like witchcraft and a little like playing roulette is tricky, but I think I have learned some tricks and strategies along the […]
Lessons Learned From Writing a Memoir or Two
“Who would read a book about your life?” That question came from a former friend, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who in 1995 aimed to convince me writing a memoir was pure folly and would likely ruin my career as a serious journalist. After selling nearly 100,000 copies in seven languages of I Closed My Eyes […]
Healing Through Writing
Imagine you are a woman with 8- and 10-year-old sons who is losing her husband to alcohol. He has refused all help and the financial betrayals must come to an end. You finally worked up the nerve to divorce him and today is the day he has promised to move out—but instead he shows up […]
From Query to Book Deal: Literary Agent Carly Watters
Here’s the story of how women’s fiction author extraordinaire Taylor Jenkins Reid and agent Carly Watters started working together. (Haven’t read her books? Try MAYBE IN ANOTHER LIFE, her most recent novel with a SLIDING DOORS twist.) In Early February 2012 I receive a query telling me the heart-breaking love story of Elsie and Ben: […]
Non-Fiction: Being Bombed Out
This is an account of what it was like to be nine years old and on the receiving end of the bombing power of a well-armed enemy. Like millions in London we were evacuated at the start of the war. My father went to Harpenden with the insurance company he worked for, two days before […]
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