Tag: women writers
A Mother and Daughter Crime Fighting Duo for the 21st Century
Literature has not been kind to mothers. From the earliest stories fed to us at bedtime, mothers die and get replaced with evil stepmothers. Coming of age stories are filled with overbearing maternal figures. It’s the mother who creates a serial killer or gives birth to psychopaths. I didn’t set out to write a mother/daughter […]
Gondoliers and Writing
Your story sounds like a movie or a book. You should write one. The gazzillionth time I heard those words when first meeting someone was when I decided to take that advice. So began a nine year passage to learning and self-discovery; almost a decade dedicated to writing a story inspired by a chance encounter […]
When To Take Advice And When To Trust Your Intuition
The first thing people spot when they step into my kitchen is a large painting tacked on the wall above the breadbin. ‘That’s lovely,’ they say. ‘Your son? He’s very artistic.’ They’re right on one score; my son painted it 20 years ago. He was about three. But lovely? That depends. It’s a simple, childish […]
When Facts Become Fiction: From Journalist in Rwanda to Novelist
Novels usually draw, to some degree, on personal experiences and historical research, and memoirs have come a long way since the scandal of James Frey’s personal revelations being more fiction than fact. The blurring of lines between the real world and the imagined has been an interesting process for me during the eleven years I […]
The Story of Infidelity: The Movie
When Infidelity: a Memoir was first published in 2000, it was greeted with a starred review from PW, a paperback auction, sales in the UK and Australia, and a movie sale. As time went on, it went out of print. Dzanc Books decided to reprint it and a trade paperback will be on the shelves […]
When Fiction is Perceived as Fact
My latest novel, Rituals of the Dead, came to be because I wanted to write a mystery about an Asmat bis pole. Considering the Asmat live in the Indonesian province of Papua, the setting for my historical mystery was easily decided. The premise was simple: my protagonist – an art history student in present-day Amsterdam […]
My Road to Publication
I’ve always wanted to write, and even as a child I loved making up stories, and telling them to my younger sister. She would often ask if I could tell her one at night, to help her get off to sleep. Unfortunately, although, according to my English teacher, I had a good imagination, I was […]
The Artistic Coma and The Arrogant Intellect
I’m a writer and a reader. I love all kinds of books. But I’m instinctively repelled by arm-achingly thick, academic-looking tomes that claim to be about the craft of writing. Those ones that include pie charts and Venn diagrams. I prefer to read words about words, am an admirer of the slender and concise, and […]
Recharging Your Creativity Between Books
Finishing a manuscript is never quite how I expect it to be. Elation wars with exhaustion; I always think I’ll want to shout to the world that I finished my book (for now at least, knowing inevitable revisions are coming) but I usually end up just going to sleep. During the final push of getting […]
A Dream of Writing
Since releasing my debut novel, I have had quite a few interviews, and inevitably they ask the same question, “When did you know you wanted to become a writer?” If I answered with the statement, I’ve had this dream all my life; I’d be lying. The truth is, there was a story brewing in my […]
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