When the email with my writing contest score sheets came recently, I closed it, put my phone down and sat perfectly still. This was the first time I had entered a writing contest. So, I worried: How bad was it? I waited half a day to read what the three judges had to say. I fortified myself…
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…
Writers create their own little worlds when they envision their stories. This is especially true for fantasies, fairy tales and those wonderful small town stories we have always loved. My Civil War novel takes place in and around a real town. With serious liberties that would probably drive a Civil War historian insane. But I kept…
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…
I looked at this photo all the time as I was writing scenes about my Civil War novel, Divided Loyalties. Although the battle took place in late summer, the hospitals around the Antietam battlefields were open through a long, cold winter. Imagine trying to heal mind, heart and body inside a big barn. Imagine the…
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…
I’ve joined a prestigious group of authors. I’ve been rejected. I got my first rejection letter for my first novel. It’s far from my first rejection letter. I’ve been turned down for magazine and newspaper articles plenty of times. I wrote a children’s book back in the 1990s and got that rejection letter on paper…
My first historical novel is finished. With tears and sniffles, I closed the book and said good-bye to my first heroine, Maureen. She is a feisty one, an 18 year old Irish immigrant, who goes on a quest to find her brother in the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in any…
Mary K. Tilghman, writer 