Category: On Writing
On Writing, by Janet Todd
I always wanted to write fiction. Over the years I started several novels—occasionally I even finished them. In subject they ranged from expatriate life in post-independence Ghana to a fictionalised biography of Mary Wollstonecraft’s unhappy sister. (Most attempts have gone out in black bin bags.) I had a family to support and it’s a lot easier […]
Interview with Maggie Humm
Interview with Maggie Humm, author of Talland House Talland House takes Lily Briscoe the artist character from the confines of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Set between 1900 and 1919 in picturesque Cornwall and war-blasted London, the novel tells Lily’s emotional journey in becoming a professional artist: her love-life, mourning her dead mother, as a […]
Resistance Is Life: On Writing and Resiliency
Resistance Is Life: On Writing and Resiliency Ava Homa on What Statelessness, Trauma, and Political Exile Have Taught Her as a Writer By Ava Homa Coming of age as a Kurdish girl in Iran, I learned early on that my being alive was an act of subversion. I belong to a people who have been subject to […]
Authors Interviewing Their Characters: Joanna Briscoe
Authors Interviewing Their Characters: Joanna Briscoe Joanna Briscoe interviews Beth Penn, the protagonist of her new novel, The Seduction The Seduction is a dark, tense story of a woman who goes to see a therapist. The therapist is there to help, but turns out to be the most dangerous person of all. Beth, an artist, […]
AUTHORS INTERVIEWING CHARACTERS: LAUREN HO
Lauren Ho chats with her protagonist, Andrea Tang of LAST TANG STANDING, to find out what makes her tick. Crazy Rich Asians meets Bridget Jones’s Diary in this funny and irresistible debut novel about the pursuit of happiness, surviving one’s thirties intact, and opening oneself up to love. Lauren: Hi Andrea so good of you to– Andrea: […]
How Writing Groups Can Help Develop Your Writing
The published writers I know have one thing in common. They’ve all worked for years to become overnight successes. It’s often difficult to see through their thousands of sales and glowing reviews, but behind it all there’s usually years of blood, sweat and tears. When people ask me what makes a successful writer, I always […]
NURTURING THE WRITING SPIRIT
by RJ Thesman When I taught English as a Second Language, my class was filled with post docs, brilliant scholars with multiple PhDs in science and medicine. One Chinese doctor specialized in the research of cancer modalities. He regularly harvested rats, collected data and reported his findings to the university. But his English was broken. […]
Kimberly Belle: 5 Things I’ve Learned From Writing Through A Global Pandemic
As an author of domestic suspense novels, I like to think that my premises are firmly grounded in reality. A cheating spouse. A missing child. Friendships turned lethal. Open any newspaper or scroll through Facebook, and you’ll find stories much like mine, tragedies that can—and do—happen all too often in the world. It’s why I […]
From Premise To Publication – Writing The Sight Of You
The idea for The Sight Of You first came to me around a dinner table with friends, where we were debating that familiar-albeit-slightly-morbid question, If you could find out the date you were going to die, would you want to know? I was fascinated by how quickly and definitively the table split between Definitely, yes, […]
AUTHORS INTERVIEWING CHARACTERS: Mary Helen Fein
Conversation Helen Breakstone, Sixteen-year-old heroine of “Stitching a Life,” and author Mary Helen Fein Helen and I met at Katz’s Deli on Houston Street in New York’s Lower East Side. Turned out we both love Pastrami sandwiches, and of course Katz’s is the best. It was easy to spot her in her long skirt and […]
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