Category: How To and Tips
A Very Good Place to Start
People always like me to start from the beginning – the good old ‘once upon a time’ approach. ‘Tell us,’ they say. ‘How did you first get into writing?’ The truth is, I was sixteen years old and I had to do a school project. So off I went to Grafton Street, bought a book […]
Moving from Fact to Fiction
Working as a journalist is more than a job: if you do it long enough, it becomes a state of mind. True to the cliché, you suspect everyone does have a story to tell. And with each story you hear, real life appears more outlandish than the most melodramatic plot. Most of all, when you […]
Who Influences You?
When I think about the authors who have influenced me, I have to go back in time—to my early teens—when I started reading gothic novels from authors like Daphne du Maurier and Charlotte Brontë. I loved the idea of a heroine coming to the house of a family she didn’t know and finding out all […]
What to Learn from Frozen, Besides the Words to ‘Let It Go’
When Frozen debuted in 2013, my daughter was two months old. I thought I missed “Frozen Fever.” Nope. A few months back, we caught it on the Disney Channel and my daughter promptly requested to have her own copy, the sing-along edition. We have Frozen sheets, cups, plates and bowls, utensils, dolls (Elsa and Olaf), […]
What’s the Point of Point of View?
The changing use of point of view has had an impact on everything I’ve written. The most visible example is in The Last Woman Standing, a historical novel about Wyatt Earp’s true love, Josephine Marcus, which I wrote and rewrote over a period of years and stages of child development. In the final manuscript the […]
Everyday Magic
My love affair with magical fiction began at seven years old, when I inhaled A Wrinkle In Time. I still remember the goosebumps that spread across my gangly arms and legs when Mrs. Whatsit blew into Meg’s life and proclaimed, “Wild nights are my glory!” This anticipation of the impossible has yet to loosen its […]
In-Person Pitching: The Thrill of Victory and Agony of Defeat
#pitching. If you’re a writer and you’re on Twitter, you know what I’m talking about. It’s super fun and super simple. Just hide behind your screen and pitch your book to all the agents on Twitter in 140 characters or less. No likes? No problem. That tweet – the one that that couldn’t even scratch […]
What a Week of Pro Tennis Taught Me About Writing
My son and I are tennis nuts. We spend days on end at the U.S. Open in New York each summer, and we travel to other major tournaments, both home and abroad, as often as we can. When a snowstorm back east a few months ago left us stranded in California – where we’d gone […]
Writing Under Multiple Pen Names
When a dream comes true, and it’s even better than your original dream, you can be forgiven for thinking you’ve reached a pinnacle in your writing journey and you’re pinching yourself to wake up. You’re floating on air. It’s all too wonderful to be true. But there it is in black and white – you’ve […]
Past, Present, Never: Writing Time In Fiction
New authors are always advised to avoid complexity, to begin with a single narrator and a straightforward plot. I ignored that advice. In my first novel, there was a story in the present which related to events in the past, told in flashbacks. In my second I had three interconnected narratives. I think perhaps I […]
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