Category: On Writing
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 & […]
How Novels Change
I thought my first novel was about a young girl who lives in a world of her imagination but I was wrong. When writing it I enjoyed the matter of fact way Jennifer Hamilton spoke to the poet Shelley and to Aphra Behn, the outrageous Restoration playwright who is said to be the first woman […]
We Are Not Labels
Once upon a time, I was a bad-ass lawyer. Clients from all over the world came to me to buy and sell companies in the Netherlands. I could swing my big dick with the best of them. Often, I was the only woman in the room and an Asian American at that. If that was […]
A Wrinkle in my Time-Line
“What are you reading?” My friend Tina was a bit of a bookworm; that was one reason why we were friends. But this was the first time she’d taken a book out to read every break time and lunch time, sloping off to the edges of the school field where footballs and nosey friends wouldn’t […]
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