The Solo Writing Retreat
Ah! The idea of one solid week of writing, and nothing but writing, kept me going for months. I had booked this week away back in June, just after returning from my annual four-day retreat with my writing group. My…
Category: Fiction
On Writing the Other: 8 Resources
We write about the other with varying degrees of rigor and success. Homer’s default was narrow (white, male, hetero, warrior), but even that long ago he tasked himself with imagining his way into immortals. Chaucer wrote in the voice of…
Taxi cab confessions: A likely driver of your characters’ motivation
Recently, a cab driver was driving me home from the airport. After hearing I’d just come from Dallas, he gazed in the mirror back at me and loudly and, completely unsolicited, declared: “Everywhere you’ve been, darling, I’ve been. Everything you’ve…
Writing the Uncanny
How do we write a truly scary story? What unsettled us in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House? What tension building secrets did Stephen King employ when drafting the locker room shower scene in Carrie? It wasn’t…
An Interview with Juliette Fay, author of The Tumbling Turner Sisters
Juliette Fay’s fourth book, The Tumbling Turner Sisters, is the story of four girls who try their hand as an acrobatic act in 1919 vaudeville, in an effort to save their poverty stricken family (Gallery Books 2016). Ultimately it is a…
So, Tell Me About This Novel You’re Writing!
I’m at a dinner party. My partner gestures to me and says to the man we’re making small talk with: “Rose is a writer. In fact, she’s writing a novel!” “Well, isn’t that something!” he begins. I take a sip…