The imminent beginning of yet another year makes me think about other beginnings – those first pages, paragraphs, sentences, words that pull readers into our tales. How do we make them sing?
Most obviously, banality is the enemy of good …
The Writer Laid Bare
A Guest Post from Victoria Thompson: Writing about Love & Sex
When I wrote my second novel The Secret Seduction and the Enigma of Attraction, I did not set out to write an erotic novel, but a love story between two complicated, intelligent, wounded people who are afraid to love …
Literary Husbands: Dictionary Definition
- Not as well-known as their female counterparts, the Literary Wives (LW). Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein’s ‘wife’, for example, is nowadays inseparable from Stein’s oeuvre; Stein even titled one of her books ‘The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas’, forever mythologizing
A Guest Post from Bambi Smyth about Mixing Creative Nonfiction Genres
I’ve never been very good at keeping things simple. When I write, I have more ideas swirling around my head than kites at a traditional Japanese festival, and invariably they get tangled up.
Similarly, when I came up with the …
A Writer’s Guide to Surviving the Second Child
Dear Readers, I just want to let you know that I wrote this blog post, and intended to send it, before my second son was born. But the baby outsmarted me and turned out before that… Hence both the delay …
A Guest Post from Leah Kaminsky: How to Write a Novel in Ten Years
It took me ten years to write The Waiting Room, my debut novel. Well, actually, that’s pure fiction – I made the number up. It was really more like thirty years. Writing my novel felt at times akin to …