Susan Breen's Blog, page 4
March 10, 2009
about seven years
I was at a book club recently and someone asked me a question that no one has before. How, she wondered, was it possible that it took me seven years to write my first book? What did I spend my time doing?
So, this is the answer.
I started off as a short story writer and spent ten years doing that, and when I decided to work on a novel, it took a while to get the hang of prolonging a story from chapter to chapter. It took a lot of reading of novels and outlining and thinking to figure all that o...
February 3, 2009
about writing process
I've written a lot of short stories and a number of novels and I've done them all the same way. I start at the beginning and write through to the end and then I realize that the ending completely changes everything. So I go back to the beginning and revise everything and get to the end and realize it changes everything and so on. With my first novel I did that about 40 times. Literally.
Since then I've become a little more efficient, but I've always liked the idea of hurling myself forward...
January 5, 2009
about henry's wives
One of the pleasures of reading biographies is getting insights into characters so unlike myself. Or anyone I know, for that matter. Recently I've been reading Alison Weir's biography of the six wives of Henry VIII and I feel as though I've hit the mother lode of characterization. Each woman is unique and complex. There's so much to chew on here that I thought it would be fun to come up with a Wife of King Henry characterization sheet that we could use for our own writing.
So, forth with:
Kat...
December 5, 2008
about book clubs in new jersey
Recently I came close to having a traumatic experience in New Jersey. I was driving to a book club meeting and everything was going well until I realized my GPS system ("Tom Tom") was telling me to go over the George Washington Bridge. And the one true thing I have learned in my life is that I never want to go on the George Washington Bridge. So I stood up to Tom Tom and changed direction, but unfortunately, because I was going 65 miles an hour, and panicking about the book club, I couldn't t...
