Category: On Writing
When Raw Writing Reflects The Fragmentation Of Memory And Identity
“A forger can imitate a painter’s brush stroke or a writer’s style and make the difference between them imperceptible, but he will never be able to make his own their obsession,” (Anne Dufourmantelle 1999). While Dufourmantelle speaks of writing as an obsession that drives writers to return to pieces over time and changing circumstances, in […]
Writing My Way Home
When I first began to write my memoir The Coconut Latitudes, it was so the past would not get lost. Like many others contemplating memoir, we are often keepers of family secrets, whether wittingly or not. Those circumstances can be paralyzing, and it certainly was for me for many years. But at some point the […]
Getting To Know Caleb: Discovering My Own Character
Sometimes characters reveal themselves to me after many months of work and countless drafts, sometimes they appear almost fully formed. The protagonist of my debut crime novel, Resurrection Bay, strode onto the page as though he’d been waiting impatiently for me to give him the opportunity. Caleb Zelic was a thirty-something investigator with a dry […]
Why Do You Write?
We’re giving away two copies of Sweta’s SARIS AND A SINGLE MALT this month, TELL US WHY YOU WRITE in the comments for a chance to win! How many times have you, the writer, been asked “Why do you write?” How often do we believe that we know why we write? But if you mindfully ponder over […]
Making Fairytales – On Writing the Book I was Meant to Write
The origins of a book fascinate me. How do writers have such clever ideas? Why don’t I have them first? How dare someone write a bestseller with an idea I had five years ago and never did anything about?! (It happens to us all, right?) But when it came to writing my fourth novel, a […]
Too Much Research (Or Why You Must Leave Awesome Things Out Of Your Book)
Case Study: WHERE THE SWEET BIRD SINGS Subject: Canavan Disease Authors choose to write about a subject, location, or timeframe because there’s something about one or all of these things that makes them tick. They’re willing to spend time, often years, rolling around in the details, envisioning the scenes, researching. But if the work is […]
Learning My Strengths
Allow me to a paint a picture of the woman I was five years ago. I worked long hours at a video game company, which almost anyone who works at a video game company does (it’s a field we join from love, you see, so we’re not supposed to mind the soul-crushing overtime.) I commuted […]
On Social Media and Writing
In my novel Friend Request, the protagonist Louise, a woman in her early forties, receives a Friend Request from a girl she bullied at school … a girl who disappeared, presumed drowned, more than twenty-five years ago. Skipping back and forth in time between the present day and 1989 when Maria disappeared, we gradually discover […]
Why I Write: Cass Morris
“He’s hurt. We’ll have to hide him under the bushes until the king’s men pass, and then we can go find the magic that will save him.” So ran the first story I remember telling — a sequel to The Last Unicorn, which I forced my cousins to act out with me. I don’t recall […]
Q&A with Laura Dave
Laura Dave is the international bestselling author of Eight Hundred Grapes, The First Husband, The Divorce Party, London is the Best City in America, and now HELLO, SUNSHINE (2017, Simon & Schuster). Her novels have been published in eighteen countries and several of them have been optioned as major motion pictures (think: Reese Witherspoon & […]
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