Category: How To and Tips
Balancing Creative Life
A number of life events pierce a person’s sense of finite time. Becoming a parent sits high on my list. My husband craved financial stability before we decided to start a family. For me, it was feeling the sting of our temporal existence; I watched my mother and aunt battle cancer at the same time. […]
What’s Your “3×3 Rule” Tally?
All right, ladies. We all want to write a wonderfully layered and complex book, right? Well, here’s a formula I implement into each and every chapter with the intention of creating wonderfully layered and complex drafts. I call it the 3×3 Rule. Start 1-3 new threads Continue 1-3 threads Teach us 1-3 new things about […]
Publishing With a University Press: A Fiction Writer’s Perspective
What do university presses publish? Although university presses focus on scholarly works, some also publish books meant for a more general audience—poetry, essays, memoirs, short story collections, and, in certain cases, novels. These titles tend to fall on the literary, rather than commercial, side of the spectrum. My path to publication My first novel, Maranatha […]
Radio Daze: How Working In Broadcasting Influences My Fiction
“Let the listener invent their own dragon.” I can’t remember who uttered this line, but it has stayed in my mind since last century, when I took a BBC News Skills training course in London. The nervy young broadcast journalists renamed it News Kills. Until a man in tweed came to our stuffy classroom to […]
Believe It, She’s Tried
In 1995, I probably could have published my first novel, Landings. But I didn’t. For the next ten years I wrote almost nothing. Telling this story means explaining the cluster of years that diverted me, those three years when I lost a marriage, a literary agent, and a job. The job wasn’t such a big […]
Indian Cooking and Storytelling: Similarities
When someone says “India”, the free associated word that often pops up in mind is “spices.” India and its cooking methods are becoming a world known phenomenon. What few people know is that Indian story telling is greatly inspired by Indian cooking. As a matter of fact, in India the Theory of Dramatics— Bharat Natya […]
Growing as a Writer
No matter what stage you are at with your writing – whether you write for pleasure, or in the hope of achieving your publishing dream, or are busy writing your third bestseller – there’s always something new to learn. Here are my suggestions for making the most of your journey as a writer: Join a […]
Winning The Waiting Game
One thing I never expected when I embarked upon my writing journey was how much time I would spend waiting. Waiting for word on literary submissions; for agents’ responses to queries; for editors’ feedback on manuscripts; for magnificent covers to announce my novels to the world; for reviews to catapult said novels to the top […]
The Unexpected Twist, and Other Delights, of Writing Mystery
Writing mystery, I find, is nearly as suspenseful as reading it, though I obviously know who the killer is way before the reader. Some mystery authors, however, have confessed to being as surprised by who comes forward as the killer as the reader eventually is! Personally, I can’t abide that level of anguish, so I plot […]
The First Page: Inspiration and Perspiration
When I decided to write a novel, I hadn’t written so much as a short story since high school. I took no English classes in college, and I’d never taken a single writing class. But I loved reading, and I’d read thousands of books in my 44 years. I’d also been a lawyer, so I […]
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