Tag: women writers
Why Do You Write?
We’re giving away two copies of Sweta’s SARIS AND A SINGLE MALT this month, TELL US WHY YOU WRITE in the comments for a chance to win! How many times have you, the writer, been asked “Why do you write?” How often do we believe that we know why we write? But if you mindfully ponder over […]
Making Fairytales – On Writing the Book I was Meant to Write
The origins of a book fascinate me. How do writers have such clever ideas? Why don’t I have them first? How dare someone write a bestseller with an idea I had five years ago and never did anything about?! (It happens to us all, right?) But when it came to writing my fourth novel, a […]
Can You Write a Biography With Limited Sources?
I think most people who come across anecdotes about the seventeenth-century English noblewoman Frances Coke Villiers, Viscountess Purbeck, would find them fascinating. Commonly told stories include the drama surrounding her marriage. Her parents disagreed on who their daughter should marry, kidnapped her back and forth, until the king and the law stepped in and enforced […]
Too Much Research (Or Why You Must Leave Awesome Things Out Of Your Book)
Case Study: WHERE THE SWEET BIRD SINGS Subject: Canavan Disease Authors choose to write about a subject, location, or timeframe because there’s something about one or all of these things that makes them tick. They’re willing to spend time, often years, rolling around in the details, envisioning the scenes, researching. But if the work is […]
Blowing Up Your Point Of View
POV. Point of view. I started paying closer attention to point of view when I read a few reviews criticizing master romance writer, Nora Roberts, for mixing her POVs. “Shameful,” said one reviewer. “Incredible,” wrote another. How could she? Didn’t she know any better? All because Nora had the audacity to write this: “He needed, […]
Learning My Strengths
Allow me to a paint a picture of the woman I was five years ago. I worked long hours at a video game company, which almost anyone who works at a video game company does (it’s a field we join from love, you see, so we’re not supposed to mind the soul-crushing overtime.) I commuted […]
On Social Media and Writing
In my novel Friend Request, the protagonist Louise, a woman in her early forties, receives a Friend Request from a girl she bullied at school … a girl who disappeared, presumed drowned, more than twenty-five years ago. Skipping back and forth in time between the present day and 1989 when Maria disappeared, we gradually discover […]
Beware Of Positive Feedback
A few months ago I sent a short story to an established literary magazine. Months past and they didn’t respond, so I sent an email. They contacted me later that evening to confirm they loved the story, very much wanted to publish it and would have an editor contact me. I never heard from them […]
Q&A with Laura Dave
Laura Dave is the international bestselling author of Eight Hundred Grapes, The First Husband, The Divorce Party, London is the Best City in America, and now HELLO, SUNSHINE (2017, Simon & Schuster). Her novels have been published in eighteen countries and several of them have been optioned as major motion pictures (think: Reese Witherspoon & […]
How Novels Change
I thought my first novel was about a young girl who lives in a world of her imagination but I was wrong. When writing it I enjoyed the matter of fact way Jennifer Hamilton spoke to the poet Shelley and to Aphra Behn, the outrageous Restoration playwright who is said to be the first woman […]
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