Author Archive: Women Writers Women Books
Dutch by birth and serial emigrant, Barbara currently lives with her husband and daughter in a tiny village in Galicia, Spain, as basic and simple as can be. W Barbara's website.
Joanna Fitzpatrick: On Writing
Inspiration has the power to shut off that critical inner voice that resides in our heads no matter how many books we successfully publish or how many awards we achieve. Mute that voice and the Muses will rush in. My earliest listeners inspired me to become a storyteller. I was a ten-year-old in a summer […]
Among Thieves: Inspiration
Since the deal announcement for my debut novel went out a little over a year ago, I have legitimately lost count of how many times I have been asked what inspired me to write AMONG THIEVES. The super fun thing is that every time someone asks me this question, I suddenly forget every single word […]
The Enduring Lessons that I Learnt at the Curtis Brown Creative Novel-Writing Course
It’s nearly ten years since I attended the novel-writing course at Curtis Brown Creative, and it’s not too bold a claim to say that those three short months changed the course of my professional life forever – helping me to subsequently find an agent and a publisher, and now have five published novels to my […]
The Zigzag Path of Writing a Novel – Rebecca Hodge
The writing universe abounds with how-to advice: write daily, write on-the-fly, plan everything, plan nothing, be sure to buy a special pen, a special notebook, the one and only brand of tea. The only thing we can all agree on is the fact that there’s no one-size-fits-all pathway to creating a novel, and indeed, what […]
On Writing “The Swing”: Reflections of a Reluctant Memoirist
By Susan Dennis I am the widow of a passionate black and white landscape photographer. I fell in love with him on our first date and our twenty-four years together flew by. I buried him with two rolls of film, one in each pocket and carried a favorite camera to his funeral. After he died, […]
On Writing Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft
I know the look by now. You tell someone you’ve just written a book about Mary Wollstonecraft. Their eyes light up but then there’s a flicker of self-doubt. “Not the daughter,” I jump in, “The mother. In fact, not just the mother of Mary Shelley, but feminism itself!” I know the look because I did […]
Finding Cecily
Finding Cecily I can’t remember not being able to read. I know Mum taught me, long before school started. It wasn’t that she was a pushy mother. Just that she loved stories and wanted to give me a key to unlock them. We soon left children’s books behind. By 10 or so I’d just read […]
Inspired by Sisterhood: Anarchy In High Heels
In the 1970s and early ‘80s I was a member of an all-female troupe of performers. This group, Les Nickelettes, occupied a defining place in my life story. Based in San Francisco, Les Nickelettes was a bit too radical for the mainstream of the time, but received a lot of attention in the underground counterculture. […]
Adult Bibs, Evasive Mint: Creating Character Memes
My family of Boomers and Millennials is just concluding a week-long reunion. We have matured and ripened over the years so this recent gathering was rife with laughter and devoid of the tensions from gatherings in the past. The twenty-and-thirty-something cousins all get along now, respecting each other’s differences, and embracing each other’s partners, and […]
On Being a Writer and an Accountant
On being a writer and an accountant by Gill Darling You may not be surprised to learn that accountancy is not a subject covered much in fiction. The novel that springs first to mind is Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry by the avant-garde novelist BS Johnson, published in 1973. Christie, young and disaffected, hits on […]
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