Ask the Author: Laura McNeal
Answered Questions (11)
Laura McNeal
Yes, I would be delighted! I have sent you a message so we can connect.
Laura McNeal
One ticket to I Capture the Castle, please. Ticket should include being locked in the keep by my children, who send food to me in a basket, the way they did with their father in the book. I have to stay there until I finish my novel.
Laura McNeal
I'm working on a historical novel set in the 19th century, so I'm reading or re-reading books that were new and exciting to Robert and Elizabeth Browning: Madame Bovary, which was Robert Browning's favorite novel when it first appeared, and Villette, which Elizabeth Barrett Browning liked better than Jane Eyre for some reason. I will also continue reading the letters they wrote to one another and absolutely everyone they knew, possibly because they had servants and never slept. Elizabeth's letters are incredibly alive and charming--much more personal, modern, and accessible than her poetry.
Laura McNeal
It isn't something I planned to do since the novel is long now (and was even longer before the final revision!). Sequels are a tricky thing to get right and are so often a disappointment. For me, it's better to stop eating while you still wish you had a little bit more dessert, but that you had these questions--that you wished you had more--is extremely gratifying.
Laura McNeal
It's taken me a long time to answer this question because I wanted to think of a really promising mystery, such as a scar on my forehead that was put there by my mortal enemy. I think that in my life the greatest mystery is my children. Who they are, and to what extent I have shaped them or they have shaped themselves. What is fate and what is subject to their own will or the interference of others? In a way, I'm almost always writing about that, but I fictionalize the parents and children.
Laura McNeal
I like to feel both surprise and recognition. The description will surprise me first, and then it will feel so true that whatever has been described (character, place, time, emotion, or thing) feels permanently etched in my mind.
Laura McNeal
Possibly. Maybe. I mean, we're still married and we still laugh at each other's jokes. There was, however, an alarming moment the other day where I meant to say "stucco" and I said "pasta," so if I am sliding into dementia, Tom will have to come up with the harder words.
Laura McNeal
Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak from Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. Bathsheba is the only romantic heroine in this period of literature who has a job and financial independence. Gabriel, besides being that sexiest of English things, a shepherd, is the ideal man: perceptive, forgiving, and good at all the things that matter in his world.
Laura McNeal
Everything inspires me to write. It's a pre-existing condition. The most crippling and yet most motivating activity is, of course, to read a great novel by someone else, one that makes writing a great novel seem both an impossible thing to do and the only thing I ever want to do.
Laura McNeal
My own work may feel insignificant or unsatisfying to me but I never doubt the value of doing it well.
Laura McNeal
I get blocked for many different reasons so I have various strategies. The biggest obstacle is confidence. If it isn't going well, I can start to panic. For that issue, I visualize writing as digging a tunnel. If I'm making little or no progress, I imagine that I've hit a rock. There's no way of knowing how big the rock is, so I tell myself I'll just keep digging until I can go around it or extract it.
If the block is really more about the book than about me, I try various writing exercises, such as writing a scene in the point of view of a different character, or I switch from third person to first or first to third.
If the block is really more about the book than about me, I try various writing exercises, such as writing a scene in the point of view of a different character, or I switch from third person to first or first to third.
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