Anna Belfrage's Blog

Admit it. You’ve all experienced that mind-numbing exercise of having to read a certain book. “It’s a classic, a pillar of our literary canon,” gushed the teacher while shoving one of August Strindberg’s works in our hands. (Swedish literary canon, obviously.) Or you were handed a dog-eared copy of 1984 and told this, this was manna for the soul. (I much preferred Animal Farm. “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” A quote that, sadly, is as applicable today as w...

Like many authors, I spend a lot of time tasting the names of my characters. Do they fit them, do they please me, are they adequate for the period—many, many questions.

Some characters come with names. Matthew Graham popped up neatly labelled as did Alex Lind, a modern woman who gave me a mental headshake before throwing the rather handsome Matthew a surreptitious look. Other characters begin life with one name and then, about halfway through my rough draft, I just change it. Inspiration has...

There are moments when I feel rather torn. In one corner of my brain my medieval characters are clamouring for my attention, in another, 17th century Matthew and his wife Alex are just as vociferous (with some reason: I’ve sort of left them hanging) In my frontal lobe my new characters are spreading out, and as I have three WIPs in various stages of completion this means I have one group of contemporary protagonists, another set of (new) 17th century characters among which figures a certain Q...

Okay, so I read a lot of romance. A lot. In general, the leads in all these romances are all DDG, i.e. drop dead gorgeous. Rarely does one encounter a romantic hero with a paunch and thinning hair, or a heroine with bifocals, a tad too many pounds round her waist and a preference for flat heels. And yes, I agree that part of the appeal is that while reading a romance I can pretend to be one of those over-represented redhaired beauties with long, long legs and green eyes. I can pretend that th...

Writing a book is about establishing a connection between the reader and the character in the book. No matter how excellent the historical details, how correct the description of everything from how to dismantle a gun to how to perform emergency surgery in the wild, unless the reader is invested in the characters, the read will leave them at most lukewarm. Unless, of course, they read the book precisely to find out how to dismantle a gun, but generally expectations on a work of fiction are so...

The men in my brain have a tendency to ambush me at the most inappropriate moments. Note the men in my brain: in real life, I have only one man, and he is not much given to ambushing me—and when he does, he calls it a surprise, ergo the ambush is a (supposedly) pleasant experience. Which it mostly is.

Anyway: while hubby (in singular) is a singularly one-of-a-kind gift to womankind (well, to me, at any rate), the men that populate my brain come in all kinds and shapes, and they’re not always...

Writing is a very creative process. In the initial stages, there’s not much discipline around as I’m so caught up in developing the story I often forget both to cook and shop, causing me to survive on copious amounts of tea and too much chocolate. This stage is exhausting – productivity is at an all-time high and I am burning energy as if there is no tomorrow, especially as I also have a pretty demanding day-job.

Some writers love this part of the process. I don’t, uncomfortable with the way...

Writing historical novels very often leads to discovering new favourites. When I started writing my The King’s Greatest Enemy series, I was very much into Roger Mortimer and Queen Isabella, only occasionally sparing a thought for Isabella’s son, the very young Edward III who became an unwilling participant in the events that led up to his father’s deposition and subsequent (purported) death.

As my writing progressed, Edward grew on me. The idea of a young boy torn in two by his love for both...

I must admit straight off that the title to this post is a tad misleading, as it is not so much about writing as it is about everything that comes with it – at least if you’re writing for publication. And seriously, there are days when I want to chuck it all in. Not the writing as such – I don’t think I can chuck it in – but the sheer slog of spreading the word about my books is, at times, borderline exhausting. Plus, I am way out of my comfort zone here, having little idea what will work and...

[image error]“No inspiration,” I sometimes sigh, while staring at the screen which remains enervatingly blank. And yes, inspiration is a must when it comes to writing—if nothing else as the igniting spark—but there’s another component which is just as important: discipline.
“Of course,” my very own muse, Ms Inspiration says. For the day, she’s wearing a rather scary outfit—all black & red leather—and out of nowhere a whip materialises. She smiles—one of those smiles that is all teeth no warmth. When she’s...