Category: Being a Writer
On Being a Writer
Writing was always something I’d considered as a career. I was good at it; it gave me a voice, and it helped me get through rough patches of my childhood. As a person who always felt unheard, telling stories through writing came quite naturally, and it gave me an outlet to announce my feelings to […]
Writing Recipes
According to a recent poll, 57% of families don’t eat together, and they eat in up to four different rooms. This has not been my family’s experience. The Mystic Cookfire: the sacred art of creating food to nurture friends and family (written by Veronika Sophia Robinson, and illustrated by Sara Simon) is a collection of […]
Family Involvement in writing; Reluctant, Conscripted or Volunteered?
‘Is writing, your family trade?’ was a recent question at a literary festival. I hadn’t thought of authorship that way before, the answer probably is ‘yes.’ My family has done the ‘word’ apprenticeship voluntarily, reluctantly or been conscripted. The family of a writer can’t help involvement in books, either reading them, inspiring or being captured […]
This Is A Man’s World…Or Is It?
Growing up as a tomboy, I didn’t understand the need to restrict girls to certain career choices, and boys to others. I wrote since I was old enough to crawl out of the womb, and the stuff I chose to write about was always a bit…non-girly. My first book, at the ripe old age of […]
A Writer’s Confession
The wise say that inspiration strikes at the oddest of hours and in the most unexpected of places. They are right. Inspiration can be found in our dreams, in a cup of tea, in conversations, in public transport, or even in the middle of a natural disaster. And when you find that muse, there is […]
Do You Have to Suffer to Write?
Famous authors are often distinguished by horrific childhoods, intensive suffering, depression or desperation. Think Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolff. Memoirists notably mine their traumas like gold, exorcising demons along the way. Of course, conflict is the core of storytelling, and emotional conflicts are fiction’s treasure, but do you have to be miserable to write great fiction? Novelists […]
Dear Me On A Bad Writing Day…
Dear Me On A Bad Writing Day, I know how you feel. I have been there. Your heart hurts, right? You feel terribly, horribly inept at this writing thing. There is not a sentence you’ve written that you are proud of. The best ones you wrote were the darlings you had to kill. You’ve contemplated […]
Rosie Garland: From Mslexia Novel Competition to Harper Collins
This month, three judges decide the winner of the 2nd Mslexia Unpublished Novel Competition. Someone is about to receive a life-changing phone call. Two years ago, I was that woman. I never imagined I would be. Fairytales are for other folk. I’d lost faith in my writing ‘getting anywhere’: indeed, I’d lost faith in my […]
The Scenic Detour to Being a Novelist
I wanted to be a writer. Always. Yet when I was graduating from college, I remember sitting on the steep back stairs to the yard of my family’s house in Johnstown, Pa, and thinking “I can’t do it. Who am I fooling? I could never be good enough to get published.” It didn’t help that […]
Who Publishes Tales From the Edge?
Writing from the edge of the world, wanting to tell our stories, our many stories that are also part of the romance, the history, the poetry of the world, it is not so easy to make ourselves heard. Even as globalization continues to be a buzz word, it is the unique particularities of lives everywhere […]
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