Category: On Writing
On Deadlines
A little over a month ago, at the end of October, I agreed to write this piece about deadlines. At that time, my editor was expecting me to deliver a draft of my new novel by Christmas. As I type, there are two and a half hours left until the end-of-November deadline for this article […]
Neglected Lady Novelists And Me
It was the 1980s and I was a student in London when I began to discover women writers who, despite belonging to my grandmothers’ – or even my great-grandmothers’ – generation, had voices so compelling and authentic I couldn’t stop reading them. They included Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Comyns, Rebecca West, Stevie […]
Dear Mr Bezos…
Dear Mr. Bezos: Your net worth just passed $95 billion. A mind-numbing number. Do you ever pause at a price tag? Worry over paying the bi-annual property tax? Waver between buying gas for your car (or paying the electrical bill for the Tesla) and taking mass transit? Or, as most authors do, use the blank […]
Transformations: From Brain Injury Survivor to Writer
It didn’t even occur to me write about it. It wasn’t as if it was an important part of the story. In fact, it was practically irrelevant. Yes, I had thought of suicide, but I didn’t have it in me, as I’d told the neuropsychologist who was evaluating me after my brain surgeries. I have […]
Where Do I Find Books To Read?
Discovering new books to read is becoming increasingly difficult in the current book market—at least for me—and I don’t think I’m the only one who’s feeling that way. Lately, I’ve seen posts on social media from frustrated readers begging for book recommendations. They claim they can’t find anything that’s holding their attention and that everything […]
Lena Manta and Her World of Storytelling
It was 2007 when my fourth novel, The House by the River, was published. No one, not even I, could have imagined how many thousands of readers this meandering river would touch, how many people it would wash away in its path, how many would come to love it and hold it so close in […]
Sex and Horror in Gothic fiction
A good ‘scare’ is a wonderful aphrodisiac. Horror prickles our skin, and works icy fingers through our blood. It demands a visceral reaction. How delicious is the sensation of fear: an echo of carnal delight. It’s hard to say where pain ends and pleasure begins in Gothic fiction, in those dangerous undercurrents, on the razor […]
Reinventing the Classics: Shakespeare Now!
The historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that large numbers of strangers only co-operate by a belief in common myths perpetuated in our folk stories and accepted by our religions. These infiltrate into literature and with time, become our guidelines. Though the worlds they describe might be different, they provide a torch for solving present day […]
Rethinking Structure
In the light of the recent sexual misconduct cases, I have been questioning again the way that we tell story. The hero’s journey, taught on so many creative writing MFAs the world over, is still our go to method for structuring our story. It is either an inward journey or an outward one. We walk […]
And Still I Write
In the early spring of 2013, my husband and I left our careers in Seattle to move to a remote peninsula in the northwest reaches of the state. It’s the place where we’d intended to retire someday, but we had another twenty years of work ahead of us. After crisscrossing the country and oceans to […]
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