Tag: women writers
Perpetually Baffled Author Seeks Clarity For Long-Term Writing Happiness. GSOH Essential.
‘Are you all right, madam?’ asks the shop assistant, eyeing me with concern. ‘You look a little lost.’ I offer her the practised smile of a woman who is asked this question on a regular basis. ‘I’m fine,’ I confide with a reassuring laugh. ‘I always look like this.’ She laughs too but there is […]
2017: THE YEAR TO END MALE BIAS IN THE LITERARY MEDIA … HERE’S HOW
Women buy two thirds of books. Women writers dominate the best seller lists and came out blazing in the 2016 Costa shortlists. So why doesn’t the literary media give us the editorial space we deserve? Two years ago, VIDA conducted a survey of some of the key literary titles in the UK and US. Its […]
How to Prevent Your Characters from All Sounding the Same
At the start of my career I had a book rejected because the commissioning editor didn’t feel my characters were ‘coming across’. I think she was trying to find a polite way of saying they were flat and dull – ‘cardboard’ characters, if you like – which is about the worst thing you can say […]
Writing Syria
Those of us who write are always more than just writers. We are parents, children, workers, volunteers, gardeners, tree huggers, high-flyers, low-flyers, all types of flyers. I am a writer who (sometimes) combines writing with social activism. In 2013 I became a volunteer activist for Syria Solidarity UK. We work with refugee and other activist […]
How Your Day Job Can Help Your Writing
I’m lucky to live in a writer’s city, full of writing friends. Every so often we meet, drink cheap wine, bounce ideas around, and complain about our day jobs. We apply together for writing fellowships, arts grants, writing sabbaticals, writing retreats. All in quest of the time to write that our jobs, just ruining everything, […]
Writing Past the “Happily Ever After”
There’s an image I remember from a movie I watched as a child, of a princess looking across the sea at a castle on a mountain, her soon-to-be home with the prince of her dreams. With that scene, the movie ended, but my contemplating had just begun. What happens now, I wondered. How do the […]
Why Won’t (Insert Name Here) Read My Book?
So you wrote the book, which is an amazing accomplishment. You published the book, which is another accomplishment. You also dug in and did your marketing homework and set up a great plan to connect with those readers, and began to get some good reviews, and began to get some sales. Now comes the part […]
Eight Ways To Make Your Writing Funnier
“If someone gets a lot of LOLs on their Facebook statuses, do you think they could be a comedy writer? Asking for a friend.” If someone asked me that, I’d go to their Facebook feed and read where theses LOLs were coming from. Of course, his mother. But then I’d cut him a break because […]
The Trouble With Writing About Family
Let us take a tiny moment from our otherwise busy day to think how difficult it must be to be related to a writer. We are not easy people, after all. Many of us are perhaps a bit moody, tense and insecure, and possibly have a slight tendency to scribble dialogue or check our Amazon […]
Q&A with Tiffany McDaniel
Tiffany McDaniel writes with a wholly original beauty that is rarely seen. Arresting. Disquieting. Luminous. This is a sample of reviews from readers. There are a thousand more like them. “I think something deep in my soul has shifted after reading this book. My gut is still churning after turning the final page 2 days […]
Recent Comments