Tag: women writers
Getting Ideas And What To Do With Them
Getting Ideas (And what to do once you’ve got them) As writers, we often get asked: “Where do you get your ideas from?” It’s a question that always tickles me. Perhaps it seems as though we writers have admittance to a special “world of ideas” that ordinary people can’t access? Perhaps we seem so much cleverer […]
Headstrong: Surviving a Traumatic Brain Injury
Headstrong: Surviving a Traumatic Brain Injury She didn’t see the hammer. For a fraction of a second JoAnne Jones saw a young black face, framed by a black hoodie, and then she descended into a place where she felt and saw nothing. Jones survived this sudden assault by a stranger, but it left her with […]
How To Develop Music As Its Own Character In A Story
Mathea Morais’ novel THERE YOU ARE (October 8, Amberjack Publishing) is coming-of-age story about two friends returning to their racially segregated hometown of St. Louis in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death and amid the awakening of the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing from her own roots in St. Louis, work as a hip hop culture writer […]
Crime Writing Tips
One of the late great Elmore Leonard’s top tips for writing was ‘Leave out the parts readers tend to skip.’ I’m a devotee, which is why ‘Cut to the chase’ remains my mantra for writing strong crime fiction. In essence and, as brutal as it is, boring bits have to go. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? […]
I Wrote This Little Book
Rachel Levy Lesser A few months ago, I ran into a friend at a smoothie shop I frequent in my town. This friend of mine was drinking a smoothie with a friend of hers — someone I didn’t know. The conversation went something like this. My friend: “This is my friend, Rachel. She is an amazing writer and she has this new book coming out.” My friend’s friend: “That’s so cool. What’s the book […]
My Route To Publication
Route to publication through oft-asked questions… Did you take a writing course? My first big step to moving from writing as a hobby to writing professionally came when I applied to take the Curtis Brown Creative course. There’s nothing like reading out your work to a room full of writers to clarify what is working […]
Resistance in Nazi Germany and the Power of Inspiration
Inspiration. I spent years looking for inspiration. I often imagined inspiration would find me on a sunny day, under a leafy tree with a book in hand and a butterfly on my knee. Clarity would strike, and like something out of a movie, I’d be inspired to create something beautiful and lasting—something with my hands […]
Why We Need Contemporary War Fiction Written by Women
At some stage during my adult life, and this will astound my history teacher if she’d discover, I found myself fascinated by the thought of writing fiction inspired by contemporary events. A thread that brought me here might have been reading Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” in my teens; another one, witnessing the terrorist […]
The Importance of Genre By Christina Hoag
One of those writing clichés tells aspiring authors to “write the book you want to read.” That may be true, but make sure your book fits into an accepted genre or no one else will read it. As I was writing my noir crime novel Skin of Tattoos, I never gave a thought as to what […]
Professional Envy
We’ve all experienced professional envy at least once in our lives. When a colleague gets a pay rise and you don’t; when you’re skipped over for a promotion; when one person on your team always seems to hit their targets. But why do we never talk about professional envy between authors? While I’m sure we’d […]
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