Category: On Writing
Am I Good Enough?
Am I any good? Is this poem, piece, painting, any good? It takes guts, major guts, to even expose oneself to this question. Do you realize how far you have come, how much work you have done, what courage it takes to open yourself to even your own judgment? Most of us who are engaged […]
The Crime Writer’s Choices
I really want to write crime fiction. I can’t help it. It may be an over-crowded field but I want to join the crowd and see what I can do. It may be a risk, but at my time of life you don’t hang around, so I’m going to give it a go. Or at […]
Why I Wrote a Self-Help Book
Looking through the shelves at my local bookstore, it seemed that I was spoilt for choice; I was going through a period in my life where I wanted answers, having had one experience of failure after another. I passed my fingers over the countless self-help books on the shelves, from books like ’10 Steps To […]
I love my writer’s workshop, but…
I am very much looking forward to my writer’s workshop which reconvenes in September after a summer break. Living in a rural and relatively sparsely populated area of Scotland such facilities, within easy driving distance, are few and far between. However – there is one thing that drives me to distraction about it – and […]
Where it Happened
The place frustrated me, intrigued me, wouldn’t let me alone. It was a valley in the Coast Range of California a fair drive north of San Francisco, where we visited my husband’s family summer after summer. The land was beautiful, with rolling hills, steep ridges, and mountains blue on the horizon. Hawks skimmed the firs […]
Sally Wolfe: Writing Life with Nuns
Sally Wolfe tells us about the awakening of the writing impulse and her unusual relationship with the mother superior of the convent boarding school she attended in the early 1960’s. Her experiences there laid the groundwork for her much later exploration of Thomas Merton and the time she spent in a Trappistine monastery, the two […]
How important is smell in your writing?
How important is smell in your writing? — Women Writers (@WomenWriters) August 16, 2014 @WomenWriters I use scent for various visceral things in my writing. Scent and taste bring the reader into the character's immediate world — AK Anderson (@A_K_Anderson) August 16, 2014 @WomenWriters Smell is a key sense we must describe in our writing. […]
Why do we categorize things?
Go into any bookstore and you’ll always see books neatly stacked and displayed under different categorizations—romance, sci-fi, horror, travel, Chinese, English—categorizations so arbitrary and authoritative as if romances don’t happen in 3013 and travelers never accidentally step into a brave new world. Growing up, I hated those imposed classifications, probably because back then I was […]
Writing to Dissolve the Mess
Writing is my ‘thing’. It’s something I’m passionate about. Even during physical and mental exhaustion, I’m plotting novels or articles, editing my work, studying or reading. But, despite having scribbled down stories since I was young, writing hasn’t always been something I’ve referred to as my ‘thing’. When I was a kid, I’d say it […]
Talking to Myself: The Importance of Keeping a Diary
I’m driving along under a gray March sky in the gray company car to a town I’ve never been to before on a highway that climbs over the Cascades and then rolls south along the coast but nowhere really near it. My iPod is playing songs I fell in love with 20 years ago. Salsa […]
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