Tag: inspiration
10 Ways To Kick Start Your Writing
Joanne Harris, @Joannechocolat, is one of our favorite authors on twitter. If you do not follow her yet, you should! 1. If you’re at a creative loose end, read. If you’re not at a loose end, read. Basically, read. #TenWaysToKickstartYourWriting — Joanne Harris (@Joannechocolat) November 28, 2015 2. Leave your reading comfort zone. Read […]
Libraries: Still All About the Story
I love libraries. I love the way they smell. The quiet hum of florescent lights and shuffling pages. I love walking up and down the stacks trailing my fingers over the spines looking for the perfect story for my current mood. I love that every book, dvd, and cd has an exact place where I […]
What is it that makes an idea great?
Where do ideas for novels come from? What is it that makes an idea great? Whatever an author decides to write must be rich enough and thrilling enough to compel their reader through 300-plus pages, to trap them wholeheartedly inside a story, leaving them unable and unwilling to climb out. It must be rich enough […]
Why I Write
It certainly is not for the fun of sitting hour after hour in my study on the days when the ideas have dried up at source and the words are being stickily stubborn, bad-tempered and unmalleable. It is not for the times when, having made a journey to an out-of-the-way book festival, it is only […]
From Ghost to Flesh-and-Blood Novelist
My first career was in publishing: acquiring, commissioning and editing fiction and general non-fiction. Writing was what other people did and, as an editor, I tried to help them make what they wrote the best it could be and publish it in the most successful way possible. Even when I embarked on my second career […]
Let It Go
Years ago, at a party in Brighton I was introduced to a writer whose book had just been nominated for the Booker Prize. I had just started telling people I was writing my first novel. He was gracious, charming. ‘What’s your process?’ he said. Process? My mind went blank. Writers have processes? If I have […]
The Magic in Magical Realism
So much has been said about magic realism that it’s difficult to add anything new to the conversation. However, I wondered if putting on my poet’s hat and parsing the two words might crack open another perspective. The term magic implies some slight of hand, an ability to make things appear and disappear at will. […]
Is Marketing Harder Than Writing?
I used to think writing a book was the hard part. I was wrong. Getting your book read is the hard part. I’d tinkered with short stories and penned a few poems over the years, and there was no denying my love of the written word but the thought of writing an actual book – […]
How We Change As Writers
Last week I was trying to downsize one of my overflowing bookshelves when I came across a copy of my first novel, The Big House. The book was published in 2003 by Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, U.K. I held my first book in my hands and felt that nostalgia we feel when […]
Writing is Just a Day at the Beach
If you combined all five Great Lakes and poured them over the U.S., we’d be under 9.5 feet of water. I live less than 10 miles from Lake Michigan, the third largest lake, and almost never visit. I usually walk on familiar paths with predictable landscaping close to my neighborhood. Similar to my walking routine, I usually write […]
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