Category: On Writing
Writing the Unthinkable
When I first started to write, it was to escape. I longed, like a snorkeler, to slip beneath cool waters and linger below the surface of another world. Bangkok was a city burning on its fringes with protests, and I began by invoking these sights and smells. This grew into a novel, a portrait of […]
Reaching Back and Recovering Women’s Voices
My passion is bringing women back from the past. I wrote Wilde’s Women when I realised that (male, for the most part) biographers had largely ignored the brilliant women who helped make Oscar Wilde the man he was. That’s why, last Saturday, 26 November, having spent two intensive days sitting in a lecture theatre in […]
Why It’s Important To Write -and Read- Romance and Erotica In An Age Of Plentiful Porn
He’s one of my oldest friends, and so, when the words come out of his mouth, I first think I’ve misheard him. “Excuse me?” I say. And he says it again, and I ask him to repeat it, again. No, that’s what he actually said. “How do your parents feel about your new career as […]
An Open Letter to Writers at Every Stage of Publishing
Dear Writer, Isn’t it amazing how we wake in the pre-dawn hours, or stay up well past midnight to write? We sit alone at our desks with our words, letting them flow as a plot unfolds. In time, a story transpires, a manuscript is finished, and a book published. Writing is a lonely, isolated road […]
Creating A Family Through Fiction
I read recently about a woman who had no family photographs of her early life so collected pictures of people she didn’t know. For years, she trawled junk shops for old family portraits and strangers’ photo albums to invent a family history. Only as a new mum did she stop buying other people’s pasts and […]
The Good Wife Guide
Asparagus has its own breaking point, a place at which it will naturally snap when bent in half. Once this green spear breaks and rids itself of its unsavory bottom wonderful things are possible, roasted asparagus, grilled asparagus salad, asparagus frittatas . . .you get the idea. When one hits her own personal “bottom” they […]
Shelley Day: Why I write
Oh, the irony, the irony, of being asked to write a piece on Why I Write, when I’m not actually writing at all, and haven’t done for months. I say ‘not writing,’ but I don’t actually mean Not Writing. Because I have been writing. I couldn’t not be writing. Only what I’ve been writing is […]
Why Fiction Matters
Imagine a world without stories. What a terrible place that would be! Stories hold up a mirror to the world; at its best, fiction has the power to be the “hammer with which to shape the universe.” If all the world is a stage, then fiction writers have many parts to play on it. They […]
Women: Missing Voices In Science Fiction
My name is Jo Zebedee and I write science fiction. That’s Jo, not Joe. And, yes, I get the odd comment about why I’d want to write something like that, and how on Earth I got into such a genre (thankfully, less as time goes on.) To answer. I got into this crazy genre without […]
A Story is a Gift
Writing fiction is an emotional investment and a labor of love. The process of storytelling forges bonds between readers and writers across borders and across time. Storytelling is a process, a relationship, and a journey. The book as product, though a recent phenomenon, is now widely accepted because authors write to sell books and publishers […]
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