Ask the Author: Gwen Strauss
Answered Questions (10)
Gwen Strauss
Thank you! It is under option and fingers crossed the wonderful producers will find the funding and interest to make a series. I wish that would happen too!
Gwen Strauss
Thank you-- I too found the question about how do soldiers go home after the war so compelling. It made me realize all the complications of returning home after battle.
Gwen Strauss
It came from an afternoon with my great aunt Helene. It was her story that inspired me, but it took me over ten years to go back and write the story. I had filed it away. I wasn't ready to write it. Sometimes I have to approach these ideas for books like one would a wild animal, cautiously, gently, and still allowing the animal to be free and alive.
Gwen Strauss
I go into my little office, my writing shed. I write my morning pages.
It's such a wonderful space and time.
Sometimes reading really good writing inspires me. Like eating good food, I feel like I want to join in the meal.
Sometimes I will hear a story from a friend and I'm off to the races.
It's such a wonderful space and time.
Sometimes reading really good writing inspires me. Like eating good food, I feel like I want to join in the meal.
Sometimes I will hear a story from a friend and I'm off to the races.
Gwen Strauss
I'm in between projects so now I am exploring four different book ideas and seeing which one will stick, like throwing pasta on the wall. I know a book takes me at least three to four years, if not longer, so I want something that can sustain the long journey- that will hold my interest. But also sometimes I'm not ready to write about something-- I need to wait to write it later. This is the hardest part, starting the journey.
Gwen Strauss
Keep writing.
That's my advice, but Goodreads says that answer is too short.
That's my advice, but Goodreads says that answer is too short.
Gwen Strauss
You can do it anywhere, it doesn't take a huge investment and you never have to retire. Once you get over the fear of being good or bad or a failure or an imposter-- all those ideas about the judgement of others (which took me YEARS to overcome) there is incredible joy and freedom in meeting yourself each day.
Gwen Strauss
I don't really have writer's block. If I have a difficult day I either sit through it or I allow myself to play by doing black-out poetry, making zines, or sometimes gardening. But I find the best cure it to sit through it and come back the next day and the next and the next. Usually only one or two days later, I am writing again. It doesn't matter how good it is once you're writing again.
Gwen Strauss
The children were not in their beds. The empty rowboat was floating in the middle of the lake.
Gwen Strauss
Philippe Sands books, Lily King's Lovers and Writers, Goldie Goldbloom's On Division, American Harvest, The Resisters, I also read in French: Lydie Salvyre and Emmanuel Carrere. Also books for my possible next projects about the treatment of mental illness and the disabled in America; or about Milena Jesenska; or about medicinal plants and the history of witchcraft in this region of France in the 15th century... I'm still trying to figure it out!
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