writing
5 Tips for Book Research
Men with uteruses, midwifery, quantum computing, Huntington’s Disease, suppressor genes, under population, and dolphin sleep patterns are all fascinating topics that have lured me in while I’ve been writing novels. Who wouldn’t be intrigued? It’s tempting to spend hours and hours learning cool new things in the name of research for a novel. But it’s hard to know which information will actually be useful, and more importantly, it’s hard to know when to stop. If a writer spends months or years doing research for a novel she hasn’t started, that… Continue reading
How To Write a Novel
Get a fairly decent idea.
Write a few pages.
Keep writing to see what happens.
Be convinced this will be a bestseller.
Discover you don’t know what you’re doing.
Keep writing anyway.
Resist the urge to go back and revise.
Get a small new idea that might be slightly helpful.
Keep writing.
Delete the last ten pages.
Delete ten more pages.
Take a cookie break.
Sigh.
Get back to writing.
Claw your way forward through the worst pages you’ve ever written.
Keep writing.
Discover you still don’t know what you’re… Continue reading
Manchester Writes
7th and 8th graders get ready to write with guest writer Caragh O’Brien at Manchester High School, Thursday, May 12, 2016.
My visit to Manchester High School was full of happy and thoughtful moments. Working with students from the high school and nearby Illing Middle School, I talked a bit about my process, answered questions about my novels and publishing, and led workshops where students wrote for ten minutes and shared their work afterward.
Writing fiction in a low-stakes, open-ended way with just the nudge of a new… Continue reading
Keeping It Simple
Some days, when I face another day of writing and my book is frankly confusing me, it takes extra effort to get started and keep going. I want solutions to appear quickly so I can let my fingers fly into a new scene, but I suspect from past experience (yesterday’s), that won’t be the case. Still, I won’t get anywhere unless I start. So I do.
I just open up the draft and find where I left off and keep trying. Sometimes, writing a novel is that simple.
The Questions
View of the Pacific from Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, CA, March 2016
Though I still have a long way to go with revising the third book in the Vault of Dreamers series, I’m starting to think about ideas for what might come afterward. I’m facing a wide-open horizon, with potential everywhere I look. It’s unnerving to have so much uncertainty before me. Part of me is tempted to lock onto an idea just so I can have something solid and sure.
I’m resisting that urge, though, because when I… Continue reading
Double Voices
Perspectives
Before I wrote Birthmarked, I worked on a novel that contained five points of view, all following different members of the same family in crisis. It was a worthy experiment, but I swore afterward that I’d never try it again. I couldn’t make all the perspectives equally compelling. I felt like I was shortchanging each character, and the collective honesty I was aiming for didn’t resonate enough.
Imagine, then, my surprise when I started writing The Rule of Mirrors and discovered I could not write it from only… Continue reading