Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Unstuck: Feedback That Stops You Cold By Martha Conway
This blog series, Unstuck, explores some of the ways fiction writers find themselves stuck and offers tips from successful writers for getting unstuck. Unstuck is a six-month series published the first Monday of the month. Read the previous installments: WRITING THE BEGINNING OVER AND OVER UNSTUCK STUCK IN THE SQUISHY MIDDLE “Here’s what I would do instead …” […]
2022 Winter Must-Reads
Let’s be honest, winter is the one time of year where we all want to be trapped inside, and there’s no better way to enjoy that then to dive into a good book. If you can’t decide what’s next on your TBR we’ve put together a list of some of this cozy-season’s most intriguing reads. […]
Authors Interviewing Characters: Sally Hanan
My Heart Went Walking by Sally Hanan (Fire Drinkers Publishing, hardback £20, paperback £11.99) is an Irish tale of love, loss and redemption. Sally Hanan’s sublime debut mixes the prose of Sue Monk Kidd with the dialogue of Maeve Binchy. With captivating warmth, she pulls us in to explore how it felt to live in […]
Cai Emmons: Time Out of Time
This piece first appeared on Medium Cai Emmons, on Time and the first anniversary of her ALS diagnosis When I was teaching college-age and graduate fiction writers, I liked to use an exercise called “Braiding Time” to encourage the students to think about the interior lives of their characters and getting closer to understanding their […]
WHAT INSPIRED THE BOOK BIBLE? by Susan Shapiro
Susan B. Shapiro is an award-winning Manhattan writing professor and The New York Times bestselling author of 10 books, including the acclaimed memoirs FIVE MEN WHO BROKE MY HEART, LIGHTING UP and ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR WORD, the coauthored nonfiction books UNHOOKED and THE BOSNIA LIST, and the novel WHAT’S NEVER SAID. Her books […]
Why I Write Funny Mysteries
By Kelly Oliver Using Humor is Serious Business When I was in graduate school (a million years ago), a guy invited me over to his place for a dinner date and served Chardonnay and Captain Crunch cereal. To be fair, he was living on a grad student stipend and had to economize, and Captain Crunch […]
Inspiration through Memoir and Self Help
Most of us carry stories from our past; some carry weeping wounds. Our tales can lift us up or anchor us in the depths of grief or rage. They can inspire or defeat us—and influence readers around the world. The story I carried, my dream since age fifteen, was to find an elusive waterfall I […]
Writing Letters to Lost Loved Ones
Writing Letters to Lost Loved Ones As a child, I was fascinated by the “dead letter office,” picturing misaddressed mail piling up in a room. Thinking someone should read all that forsaken mail—surely unopened letters were lonely—I wondered if the post office took volunteers. My romantic notions about “dead letters” took a turn in my […]
How History Inspired THE SECRETS ACT Alison Weatherby
How History Inspired THE SECRETS ACT Alison Weatherby When I visited Bletchley Park with my family, I was supposed to be taking a much-needed break from writing. I’d recently broken up with my US literary agent and had put my YA mystery in a virtual drawer. It was also a tense time for women, as […]
The World Through Your Eyes: A Journey Of Self-Discovery Through Love
In her debut novel, released on 1 May 2022 by Guernica Editions and set between the UK, Italy, and the Middle East, UK-based journalist, writer, and gender equality advocate Valeria Camerino aims to bridge the gap between different cultures through the universal language of love. “We are all just humans trying to figure out life,” […]
Recent Comments