Category: On Writing
A Brutal Paradise
This piece by Louisa Treger first appeared on Isabel Costello’s wonderful website THE LITERARY SOFA ‘Every writer has a myth-country,’ wrote Doris Lessing in African Laughter. Hers was an old house made of earth and grass on top of a hill in the Lomagundi District of what was then Rhodesia. My myth-country is a white house […]
Mother and Daughter: On the Page and In Real Life
I held the signed book contract in my hands, had video-taped my happy dance for Facebook, and was already dreaming of book store signings and podcast interviews. Only then did I realize my mistake. I’d neglected something important, and now, more than just my debut novel was in peril. Through the years of revisions and […]
The String Games, Working In Education and The People’s Book Prize
Ten years ago, I realised I was investing too much time and energy into my career and I was missing a creative outlet. Working in education, I found job satisfaction in watching students progress in their learning but as a teacher I was standing still. So what did I do? I started writing a novel. […]
A Perfect Explanation (Salt Books)
My father was sold by his mother to his aunt for £500. This shocking truth, which came to form the backbone of A Perfect Explanation, was something I’d known all my life. I don’t remember learning it – so casually was it known in the family that its existence was not something of drama. It […]
The Weather Here
My own internal and external storms increasingly seem to mirror the weather patterns of climate change. I started noticing this last year, just after turning 60. I closed my law practice, hoping, with my daughter several years out of college, I could turn my attention elsewhere, I could spend time listening to and answering my […]
Writing Without A Plan
I did not come to creative writing with a plan. I had moved between the worlds of books and design in past lives: as a book editor at several publishing houses in New York City and — after years of study at Parson’s School of Design — designing interiors in the New York metro area. […]
How I turned two things I loved into a Book
When I first started baking challah, it came out looking like pita. I was pregnant and we’d moved to Colorado Springs. I had to go to the library to look up high altitude baking (this was in the eighties) and while I was there, I picked up an old book on a display shelf. I […]
Nuance vs. Propaganda
Most novels have a message of some kind, even it’s just “sometimes you have to break yourself out of a bad place to get to a better one.” We all want the stories we’re reading or watching to have some meaning. That’s why we started telling them to each other in the first place. But […]
What Inspired Me To Write The Perfect Dress
Auspicious maybe, but a comment I remember from my childhood was: ‘Louisa has very interesting dress sense’. According to my mother, I used to rock-up to primary school wearing jewellery made from tin foil, homemade shoes, and my favourite vest over the top of everything – very ahead of the underwear-as-outerwear trend. I can remember […]
The Spy Who Knew Too Much: Researching and Writing The Prisoner in the Castle
By Susan Elia MacNeal At the end of The Paris Spy, the seventh novel in the New York Times-bestselling and Edgar-nominated Maggie Hope series, our plucky heroine finds herself in a predicament—she’s a British secret agent who knows too much about D-Day. What happened in real life, I wondered, to the spies who knew too […]
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