Ask the Author: Marjorie Nelson Matthews
Answered Questions (7)
Marjorie Nelson Matthews
Thanks for thinking to do that, Pat. This is all new for me, but I wonder if Amazon won't let you post until pub date? I'll check with the publisher's marketing director and see if she has a better explanation.
Marjorie Nelson Matthews
Take one of Joni B. Cole's workshops—preferably A Prompt and Pinot.
Marjorie Nelson Matthews
The joy of writing—the way 3 hours can disappear and feel like ten minutes when you're truly immersed in the process.
Marjorie Nelson Matthews
Begin with humility. Assume you have a lot to learn and that it will take time. Sign up for writing classes and workshops. Seek out a writing community. In my area, the Writer's Center of Hartford, Vermont, created by Joni B. Cole, offers a rich selection of workshops and a diverse community of writers. Write and then share your writing. Read a lot. Read the work of respected authors and the work of fellow aspiring writers. Read some of the great books on writing. I recommend Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction, E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, Joni Cole's Good Naked and Toxic Feedback and there are many more. Attend to what works and doesn't work in the writing of others. Pay attention to what works in what you write. You learn most from identifying what DOES work. Remember that when you begin, you don't know what you don't know and stay open to learning. Have fun and write for the joy of it. Remember that it doesn't have to be a competition. The writing process itself will feed your soul.
Marjorie Nelson Matthews
I'm now in the final revision stages of a novel I began before Hawai'i Calls. Ten years ago I struggled to find a workable structure for the novel which I currently call The Red Wheelbarrow and I set it aside. After Hawai'i Calls was accepted for publication, I returned to the first novel and figured out a structure that I hope serves my objectives.
Marjorie Nelson Matthews
I'm not sure what first prompted my interest in writing as a child—perhaps simply reading—but during my first year teaching at a community college, fellow faculty members invited me to join a poetry group they were forming. I experienced a deep and somewhat mysterious joy while writing and the practice of sharing my work and reading the work of others created a powerful sense of shared purpose and mutual support.
Marjorie Nelson Matthews
My father gave me scrapbooks containing the newspaper columns my grandmother had written first for a small Sodus, New York newspaper and then for The Honolulu Star-Bulletin during the mid 1930s and into the 1940s. For the Sodus paper, she wrote columns describing her journey from New York to Hawaii and her first impressions of Oahu. For the Star-Bulletin, she wrote as a social columnist about the celebrities and the wealthy who visited Honolulu as well as the local social scene. I realized my grandmother's personal narrative offered the skeletal structure for a novel and her columns provided rich contextual information about the place and era.
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