Susanne Dunlap's Blog

If you’re on my email list or following me on social media, you’ve already heard me going on about dual-timeline novels, about how much I love to read them and marvel at the skill it takes to write one.

Where is all this coming from? I think two places:

1. Discovering Susanna Kearsley’s novels, and

2. Finding out that Kate Morton has a new novel out (which I possess in a beautiful hardcover).

Although I’ve...

Yes, it’s a lot. And no, I’m not a writer who is used to creating books in that amount of time. So how am I doing it?

Basically, all three of the books that have come out or will come out in the 15 months since last August have their origins much further back in my writing life. I don’t just mean I had the ideas. I had manuscripts, which, for one reason or another, didn’t make it into book form for years.

This is, of course, the opposite advice than is often given to young writers. But it occurred to me from a chance comment by someone on my email list that this is exactly what I do—in a way. I don’t write from ignorance. Perhaps it would be better to say that I write what I want to learn about.

Write what you want to learn about!

In looking back over my oeuvre (to use a pretentious word, tongue firmly in ...

Cast on 28 stitches. Size 19 needles. Knit one row. 

I had to throw so much yarn away before I moved, thanks to the moths. Alpacas and merinos that would have felt soft and warm as they slipped through my fingers and grew row by row into something, anything. Blues and grays and purples, rich with possibilities. I tried to save what was left, pulling apart the strands to get to where the bugs had stopped ch...

This is a question I’m asked from time to time by inexperienced writers, who are—quite naturally—concerned that they’re not seen as copying another author or idea, or are afraid of having someone else copy theirs.

I say “quite naturally,” because in many areas of our life, we’re encouraged to be unique, original in our thinking and accomplishments, to claim ideas as our own, and somehow that is proof of int...

The peculiar thing about writing a book is that sometimes you don’t know where the idea for it came from. Other times you can trace it exactly to something you saw, heard, read, researched, etc. But whatever spawned the idea, something about it made you feel as if you had to write it, had to get the story out of your head and onto the page, and would do anything to make that happen.

And when it does, that ...

One of the things I do that might make people think I’m a little crazy is that I rewatch my favorite series, over and over again. It’s partly for comfort and reassurance: I know how things will turn out in the end, and during a tough year, that’s helpful.

But I also learn a lot as a writer from watching and rewatching, experiencing how the stories are told and what decisions the writers and directors have m...

I moved into an apartment in an old mill building in Biddeford, Maine in February of this year. Although I have a daughter, grandsons, and a brother and his family who live in Portland (twenty minutes away), I knew no one in this town.

I stayed in touch, of course, with my friends in Northampton, MA, where I had lived for 34 years, and had book-coaching clients all over the US whom I met with over Zoom. But...

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The post My Last Traditionally Published Book Came out in 2012. Why Was That? appeared first on Susanne Dunlap.

My twelfth historical novel, The Portraitist, is coming out with She Writes Press on August 30 of this year. It’s a book I’ve been working on in one form or another for seven years. I’ve also written and published novels within the space of a single year, usually because I was under contract to a publisher, but not always. I’ve been traditionally published, hybrid published, and self-published. I’ve had cre...