Category: On Writing
Healing Through Writing
Imagine you are a woman with 8- and 10-year-old sons who is losing her husband to alcohol. He has refused all help and the financial betrayals must come to an end. You finally worked up the nerve to divorce him and today is the day he has promised to move out—but instead he shows up […]
From Query to Book Deal: Literary Agent Carly Watters
Here’s the story of how women’s fiction author extraordinaire Taylor Jenkins Reid and agent Carly Watters started working together. (Haven’t read her books? Try MAYBE IN ANOTHER LIFE, her most recent novel with a SLIDING DOORS twist.) In Early February 2012 I receive a query telling me the heart-breaking love story of Elsie and Ben: […]
Writing Black Comedy
Three years ago, I went on a ‘Work in Progress’ writing course to try and find a way to flesh out the bones of an idea I had for a novel. Part of the course was a one-to-one feedback session with the writing tutor. Each delegate had to submit a piece of sample writing and […]
Why I Write
It certainly is not for the fun of sitting hour after hour in my study on the days when the ideas have dried up at source and the words are being stickily stubborn, bad-tempered and unmalleable. It is not for the times when, having made a journey to an out-of-the-way book festival, it is only […]
From Ghost to Flesh-and-Blood Novelist
My first career was in publishing: acquiring, commissioning and editing fiction and general non-fiction. Writing was what other people did and, as an editor, I tried to help them make what they wrote the best it could be and publish it in the most successful way possible. Even when I embarked on my second career […]
Growing up in Italy – a literary journey
I recently launched a small publication company which specialises in Italian women writers. When I tell people, they either nod knowlingly or look quizically at me, and in both cases they say: “Ah, books in translation”. My love of books goes back a long way. Family lore tells of how often I could be found, […]
My Days As A White Collar Girl
With the publication of White Collar Girl, my third adult historical novel, I have to take a moment to reflect on how I got here. Looking back I can honestly say that my previous career as an advertising copywriter served as a great training ground for becoming a published author. Advertising taught me three important […]
Note to Self: What Does That Book Smell Like?
Every book is a portal to a different world. As a child, I especially loved stories about animals. One of my favorites was Charlotte’s Web, which made me long to be a girl named Fern with a pet pig named Wilbur, because of its vivid descriptions of everything from the busy farmyard to the noisy […]
Tackling New Writing Challenges
I’ve been writing contemporary series romance for Harlequin since 2004. I love writing family drama that revolves around a couple falling in love, but after a decade of writing shorter storylines I was growing antsy and wanted to try my hand at writing a “bigger” book. I spent a year working on a single title […]
Amanda Prowse on Writing
I always find it hard trying to explain to non-writers, the need, the compulsion I have to put pen to paper, or more accurately, finger to keyboard! I’m never sure if it’s because I didn’t start writing, properly writing, until I was forty and am therefore playing catch up, or whether I have caught this […]
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