Category: On Writing
Cooking Up A Book by Cauvery Madhavan
by Cauvery Madhavan Twenty years ago, I abandoned my husband and three children for a brief ten days and headed down to deepest West Cork to figure out if I wanted to be a writer or a cook. Was I going to start my first novel or was I going to make something out of […]
Twins As Fictional Characters
People often ask me why I chose to have twins as two of the main characters in my debut novel, The Takeaway Men. And also, since I am not a twin myself, how did I get into their heads and depict them accurately? The fraternal twin girls in my Historical Fiction book, Bronka and JoJo, […]
Writing A Girl Made of Air – Nydia Hetherington
Writers are often asked about their process, about the hows and wherefores of getting a novel onto the page. In truth, I’m not sure what my process is. For me, writing A Girl Made of Air was a leap of faith. In my former life I’d created fictional worlds through devised theatre in Paris, where […]
From Translating Dostoyevski to Writing Fiction
Natasha Randall’s debut novel Love Orange is out now from riverrun (Hachette). She has translated many novels from the Russian including Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Zamyatin’s We, and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. Her words have appeared in The Yale Review, the TLS, the LATimes Book Review, The Moscow Times and in Strad magazine. We asked her how translating […]
When A Title Is Magic
Some writers have a tough time coming up with titles. Others don’t. I usually don’t have a difficult time with titles; however, I did find myself in that position recently. I thought about why I was stuck and what I realized was that I had forced the title on the story rather than let it […]
Author A.R. TAYLOR interviews her main character, JENNA MCCANN from her new novel, JENNA TAKES THE FALL.
Perfect for fans of Followers by Megan Angelo and If You’re Happy and You Know It by Laura Hankin, JENNA TAKES THE FALL by A. R. Taylor (September 1, She Writes Press) is a darkly humorous, at times absurd, coming-of-age novel that examines the life of a young woman who becomes infamous before she becomes anybody at all. At just twenty-four, Jenna McCann […]
Catch a Passing Thought – Writing Dreams They Forgot
My new book Dreams They Forgot is a collection of twenty-three short stories, a mosaic of diverse characters travelling the high and low roads of time and place. An Irish woman immigrates to 1800s South Australia in search of the land of plenty. A man burdened by secrets appears on a 1970s TV game show. […]
This Too Shall Pass
We read historical fiction for a range of reasons beyond the pleasure of being immersed in another time and place. It gives us the chance to see beyond the names and dates, acts of Parliament and movements of armies to the people who lived through the great moments of history. We are led to imagine […]
Finding Common Ground
Debra Thomas eloquently tells the story of millions of immigrants in her upcoming novel LUZ. She has worked with immigrant communities in Southern California for decades, is an immigrants rights activist, has toured with Amnesty International to the US/Mexico border (speaking to people of both sides of the border, including Border Patrol agents). Finding Common […]
On Writing HERE SHE IS: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America
I wrote Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America, a book that uses beauty pageants to show how American femininity has changed over the centuries, because I thought it was a book I was uniquely positioned to author. I’m a sociologist and professor at Brown University, where one of my […]
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