Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You
Okay, ladies: It’s almost springtime. You’ve spent the winter tightening up that manuscript, writing the (gulp!) first 30 drafts of your query letter, and you’re ready to hit “send.” It’s Agent Time. And you, fellow writer, are on your way to getting published. No, no, wait. Not yet. DO NOT SEND THAT LETTER. Read this […]
Dumped: Stories of Women Unfriending Women
An anthology? How hard could that be? Great idea. Get other writers. Everyone already loves the title. “It’s just way more work than you can imagine. Even if you imagine a lot of work, it’s more.” Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon It was at least five years ago when the percolating began. You know what […]
Women Writing Women
Like most of us, I began writing with the hope of creating the kind of novels I most wanted to read. While I tried to figure out what that was, I was lucky to land a minor ghostwriting job, which led to more. Writing as someone else came easily. I could submerge in another person’s […]
As an Author, Do You Need an Intern?
An ‘intern’ is the new literary or arts apprentice which is more skilled than ‘work experience’. And some can be VIRTUAL interns, working from anywhere. ‘Self –employment’ is an increasingly important choice for creatives and our culture needs more entrepreneurs AND authorpreneurs. Until now, I’ve avoided having an intern. Despite requests to provide work-experience for […]
Life After Switching Genres; Don’t Be Afraid!
A friend surprised me recently when she said “You write best when you write Creative Non-Fiction.” That is not who I started out to be and that is not what I started out to write. Writers have been taught that best practice involves writing what you know. Why didn’t I think that applied to me? […]
In Defense of Head-Hopping
In writing, head hopping is defined as using an omniscient third-person narrator to hop from the head of one character right into another. This is thought to cause confusion for the reader and leave them wondering whose thoughts they’re supposed to follow now. I understand that the idea of keeping a sharp line between the […]
Literary Snobbery
Sara Sheridan, creator of the Mirabelle Bevan Mysteries, talks about how literary snobbery is divisive within the writing community, not least between men and women. I live in a City of Literature, but I’d rather live in a City of Words. Literature, to me, isn’t necessarily a good thing – it’s exclusive, for a start. […]
How to write good, realistic dialogue
Best-selling novelist Isabel Wolff offers her tips on how to write good, realistic dialogue. Dialogue is what happens when two or more characters talk to each other. We’ve all read novels in which that conversation is conveyed very awkwardly and this clumsiness pulls us out of the book. Good dialogue, on the other hand, is […]
The Power of Dark Stories, and Why we Are Not Always What we Write
Where do you get your ideas from? It’s the question nearly all artists dread. We try to get round it in various ways, by making jokes (my standard response tends to be; “Goblins bring them during the night”), but actually the answer is simply this: They come from my brain. Okay. But what if one […]
Quick Guide to Self-Publishing
The stigma around self-publishing is still strong. ‘If it’s a good enough manuscript it will find a publisher,’ is an oft repeated phrase (particularly by those who have found a publisher). After thirty years of writing, honing my crafting and, yes, on occasion being traditionally published, I no longer believe this to be true. Yet […]
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