Ask the Author: Helen Balkwill
Answered Questions (6)
Helen Balkwill
Ask me again closer to summertime.
Helen Balkwill
I dwell with writer's block by not dwelling on it. Shelve whatever the project was and concentrate on something else until the urge to write about it comes back again. This method has worked for me so far.
Helen Balkwill
I like non-fiction. I like winkling out the interesting stuff of life, collating it and presenting it in the form of a bigger picture. I find this satisfying.
Helen Balkwill
Having only recently released my first published book, I am taking a break between other writing projects whilst I focus on publicising this work. But I have ideas for possible future books bubbling on a back burner somewhere.
Helen Balkwill
I don't get inspired to write in any particular fashion. I simply write when I get the urge. Luckily those urges come more often when I have a particular writing project to focus on.
Helen Balkwill
The subject matter, which is the mysterious death abroad of my father when I was a child and my search, once an adult, for the truth about what happened to him, have been with me almost all my life. However, how to present the story in a book took years to evolve. It eventually came about by a process of elimination, if anything. Over time I whittled down the ways of presenting the story that were not working until I eventually found a successful format. This involved looking around at a range of styles of presentation by previous authors of both fiction and non-fiction and pulling these together. In particular I used a lot of images and memorabilia that I found in a family collection, both as milestones in my telling of the story as well as to illustrate the book.
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