Category: On Writing
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 […]
Revenge in writing
I was flicking through an old copy of my local paper when an article caught my eye. They were looking for submissions for a writing competition on the theme of “anniversary” to tie in with the Queens Jubilee celebrations. One drawback – the deadline was that day! Immediately, an idea came to mind. I’d been […]
Susan Vreeland: Fiction and Art
Sometimes I’m baffled about what Tracy Chevalier and I set in motion in 1999 with our two Vermeer novels, my Girl in Hyacinth Blue and her Girl with a Pearl Earring. They both hit the New York Times Bestseller List about the same time, and ever since, there has been a flurry of ekphrasic literature, […]
Documentary writing: Different from fiction?
Margot McCuaig writes fiction and makes documentaries. We asked her if she could provide us an insight into the differences between the two. Writing fiction and writing, producing and directing factual documentary films are different disciplines. To some extent at least the creative processes are poles apart. Fiction is freestyle; it is frequently an embodiment […]
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