I’m busy editing the manuscript of my Civil War novel. Cutting and pasting, rewriting and rethinking. Oh yes, and occasionally cussing over why I can’t keep things straight in Scrivener. (I’m learning!) So I laughed when I came across this photo from my visit to the Morgan Library in New York last December. When Lord…
Usually, I wander idly through Twitter. It can be amusing or enraging. I laugh at the funny tweets and retweet the occasional brilliant ones. Sometimes, though, one sticks with me. This one did. “The first draft of your story is the story you tell yourself.” I never thought of that. But it’s true. My first drafts…
They don’t even know it but I consider Laura Drake, Jenny Hansen, Orly Konig and Fae Rowen among my mentors. The authors who created Writers in the Storm offer practical advice on the highs and lows of writing. Their columns keep me writing when I feel off, and inspire me to go back to work when I’ve…
This is always worth reading. Now I’ll go try to write something worth reading. Happy Friday!
Did you save your first rejection letter? Jack London saved his — one of several hundred he received over his career. I took a picture of the rejection, scribbled at the bottom of his query, when I visited the busy Jack London State Park in California’s Sonoma Valley. “Interest in Alaska has subsided,” said the editor…
Charles Dickens’s manuscript for A Christmas Carol lies open in a great hall of books, the Morgan Library in New York City. There it is by the great fireplace in a plexiglas box. Children await a story time, based on the popular novel. Visitors file through the room, examining the Gutenberg Bible, the various musical scores…
I had to have this little magnet the minute I saw it. If Charlotte Bronte had resisted the urge to write — lady writers weren’t well regarded in her day — I never would have met Jane Eyre. I can’t imagine going through life without the courageous heroine of this beloved novel. My mother gave me Jane…
Ann Patchett recommended Big Magic and I love Ann Patchett‘s writing so much, I went out and got a copy of Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Part memoir, part self-help book, Elizabeth Gilbert‘s latest is an easy read in a conversational tone. The author of Eat Pray Love, Gilbert writes about taming fear to release our inner creativity. She talks about…
Ann Patchett, the author of Bel Canto and her newest, Commonwealth, was having lunch with Ralph Fiennes. It was during her freelancing days and she had flown to London to interview him. He was at the height of his “Ralph Fiennes-ness,” Patchett quipped. After a waiter came up and told Fiennes he was an actor too, she…
Mary K. Tilghman, writer 