Category: On Writing
Taking The Restricted View
Outwardly, Spain wears its complex history with disarming simplicity: in a village cemetery, a human thigh bone stands propped against the wall; a fading pencilled statement, apparently equally forgotten, records the arrival of Nationalist troops on the 20th day of September 1938; on the rubbish heap above the village, among the old tiles and bricks […]
A Sense of Place
“By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation. It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end. Whatever there was of fresh white paint sprang out from downs or dunes, […]
Shared History
At 7:30 a.m. on a summer morning, the northern Wisconsin air did not yet hint at the promise of another typically beautiful day. Our twelve-year-old selves, denied the future pleasures of hot coffee, had stoked ourselves with pancakes and bacon. Dressed in the camp uniform of blue shorts and white blouses, some of us with […]
Readers: The Start Of A Story
The question I am most often asked is: “Where do you get the ideas for your novels”? While there is no single answer, there is a source that never ceases to inspire me— my readers. To understand such an answer, you first have to know that I am a Facebook Fanatic. The same is […]
A Lab Of One’s Own, Science And Suffrage In The First World War
Serendipity is my favorite word and my guiding principle for research. Coined by society gossip Horace Walpole in the eighteenth century, it originated from an ancient Persian fairy tale about three princes from Serendib (now Sri Lanka), who travelled in new directions by taking advantage of whatever chance happened to throw at them. About five […]
Basia Briggs on Writing Memoir
Basia Briggs is a luminary of the London social scene and a distinguished fundraiser, having played a fundamental part in the installation of the Queen Mother’s Gate in 1993 and the regeneration of Hyde Park Corner. She has written for various publications including The Telegraph and the Daily Mail. Born in London, she emigrated briefly to Australia before returning to […]
The Minefield They Call Genre
When I started reading adult fiction many years ago nobody ever mentioned the word ‘genre’. Yes, there were novels that tended to be read only by women and others (largely thriller, spy or cowboy stories) that were clearly aimed at men. Crime novels either fell into the cosy Agatha Christie mould or the deeper, darker […]
Why Add The Bad Stuff?
My second published novel, Here Casts No Shadow, explores a number of quite dark themes – war, death, revenge, mental illness and forced displacement. People sometimes ask me – why, when there’s so much sadness in the world, do you have to add to all the bad stuff? We have enough awful news thrown at […]
The Long and Winding Road to My Agent
There I stood, hands trembling, moments away from playing a starring role in my very own thriller. One where an irate passenger strangles an unsuspecting gate attendant in front of hundreds of horrified witnesses. I had flown from LAX to Atlanta and was attempting to board my connecting flight to Tennessee. At the gate a […]
Luck In Writing
I’m lucky. Not in a “you’re caller number ten” kind of way. I’ve never won concert tickets or a free cruise. I’ve never hit triple sevens or called out, “BINGO!” No, I’ve got the slow-burning kind of luck, the kind of luck that builds into something momentous. Today my debut novel, Between Earth and Sky, […]
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