Laura Benedict's Blog, page 37

Letting Go

Taking long drives is one of my passions. It doesn’t matter if I’m alone or with someone else. Either way, I feel renewed as the highway unspools behind me. Traveling lets me divide my life into small, manageable sections, like a timeline of events that’s always moving forward.

This weekend Husband and Ireturned from a teaching trip to Western Virginia, which is one of the places of my heart. I confess that it’s always a little painful to leave behind the Blue Ridge mountains for the flatl...

Charlotte’s Story

Available October 15, 2015

Step back into Bliss House, the yellow-brick Virginia mansion with a disreputable, dangerous past, that even the sheen of 1950′s domesticity cannot hide…
The spring of 1958 in southern Virginia was a seemingly idyllic, even prosperous time. A young housewife, Charlotte Bliss, lives with her husband, Hasbrouck Preston “Press” Bliss, and their two young children, Eva Grace and Michael, in the gorgeous Bliss family home. On the surface, theirs seems a calm, picturesque...

My Favorite Things: The Ten Things I’d Give You If I Could

I was never a huge Oprah Winfrey Show fan, mainly because I was just out of college and working long days when it first came on. A few years later I was a young mother at home, but I didn’t watch much daytime television because itfelt like such an indulgence (except for my favoritedearly-departed soap opera, Another World, and Days of Our Lives, of course–those were as necessary as my daughter’s afternoon naps). And late in the game, after I began to write novels, the very mention of Oprah...

Come and Write with Me This Summer

I came at writing the hard way. But I’m not special. Every writer comes to their work that way. Writing–fiction, non-fiction, poetry, screenwriting–is difficult, and there is no single road to…I’m reluctant to finish with the word success because success always means different things to different people.

Many writers start out quite young, pouring their thoughts and heart and stories onto the page. The words seem to flow from them, almost as if by magic.They write by imperative, and their w...

Chocolate Won’t Get You Unstuck: This Writer’s Internal Dialogue About Food.

Chocolate Won’t Get You Unstuck: This Writer’s Internal Dialogue About Food.

Me: You have this weird habit that I don’t understand.

Me, too: Which one? I have a lot of weird habits.

Me: You’ll be sitting there at your desk, concentrating on a paragraph or a page or on whatever it is that you do, and then you suddenly get up and wander to the kitchen and open up the cabinet and break off a square of chocolate and eat it on your way back to your office. Then you sit down again.

Me, too: That...

Of Course I Believe in Ghosts

I write about ghosts, so people often ask me if I believe in them.

Of course I believe in ghosts. My real life experience with them is limited, I think, because I want it to be. Even though the one compelling experience I’ve had was pleasant and benign—a smiling, elderly man in a rumpled brown suit who nodded to me in an old house located on the campus of a historic boarding school—I don’t spend much time looking for ghosts. They are too unpredictable.

I believe in ghosts because I think th...

The Butterfly House

Somewhere back in my years’ worth of blogs, I know I’ve written about Julia Cameron’s classic book on creativity, THE ARTIST’S WAY. It’s been a few years since I readthe book and completed its intense series of exercises, but the habits I learned from it have stuck with me for the most part. One habit that I haven’t been so great at sticking to is The Artist Date. The Artist Date can be anything you want it to be, as long as it feeds your creativity, or similarly, your soul.

I used to be prett...

The Journal

I spend a lot of time evaluating the relative value/usefulness of things. I want just the right tool at the proper time–but it shouldn’t be extravagant or wasteful. Comparison and criticism are nasty bedfellows. In the past I have silently judged infrequent cooks for buying $300 dutch ovens, when I know my pretty, red $60 enameled Lodge tested nearly as well and cooks like a dream. (Okay, it can only stand a 400 degree oven, rather than 500, but I’ve never needed it to be hotter than that.) A...

On What to Write

I have oneInstagram account and I’ve been thinking about making another one just for photographs of the 12 acres on which we live.There is so much richness in even just a single acre—in even a few square feet—that it would be cheating, because even if I tried, I would never be able to take the same picture twice. Nature is a vast collection of variables. Nature is change.

Nothing is ever the same from moment to moment, and each moment tells a story. Light, temperature, season, weather. Some b...

From Days of Our Lives to The Road–What’s a Writer to do With the Kids?

Every book I write has its own special backstory: the way it came about, the books I read or films I watched while writing it, what was going on in my marriage, my diet, or inside my head. I can make all the plans I like (though I never write to a strict outline) ahead of time, but no book is ever exactly as I imagine it to be on the first day I sit down to write. Every extra doughnut, good hair day, or sick day will influence it. Think of writing a book as creating a special meal. You can wo...