Different genres allow me to not feel so hemmed in by my own voice, tics, style.
I'm about to start something new. I'm waiting to be whelmed. The whelming as you start something new is quite something.
One of the reasons I write in different genres is that I get to have the feeling - even fleetingly - that I'm not just writing like Baggott again. I can escape myself.
I try not to divide plot and character. I get to know a character by what they want and fear and how those internal forces play out in their lives.
The intricacy of plotting a thriller is akin to writing formal poetry.
I've left the Church - for many reasons that I've written about publicly - but it's still a large part of my identity, and I still have my faith, if not my Church.
I believe we're brutes, but then, miraculously, there are those among us who stand up against that brutishness and remind us of the goodness we're capable of.
I'm a writer of faith. I was raised Catholic, and I have a deeply Catholic imagination.
My work is to know the characters intimately and to tell their story.
I have faith in human beings. I struggle with that faith.
Sometimes when reading aloud to my husband, I'll start crying. It completely stuns me. As if the words in my body and on the page - in relation to each other - are cocooned against my own feelings about what I'm writing until they're loosed in the air and become their own. Then I realize what I may or may not have done.
I don't know when I'm writing dark. I don't know when I'm writing funny or even heartbreaking. I'm always just trying to write it true.
My childhood was marked by the great fear of nuclear holocaust. We practiced our Civil Defense Drills, lining up in hallways, curled to the floor, but we knew we'd die or, worse, survive only to suffer radiation and slow death.
You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person's ear - and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make.
Women are constantly underestimated in our power, our reach, our collective pull.
The fact is there are many women who nod politely, even agree openly within their male-dominated often highly educated cultures, but vote their own minds.
Some of the best work done to combat the Republicans has been wit and humor.
I believe that one of the most damning things about our culture is the adage to never talk religion and politics. Because we don't model this discourse at the dinner table and at Thanksgiving, we don't know how to do it well and we're not teaching our children about the world and about how to discuss it.
If men are paid/praised more than women for the same work than it always pays to allow the man to have more freedom to pour himself into his work - think of athletes, actors over the age of 28, lawyers, accountants, college deans.
I want women writers to write boldly, wildly, deeply. I want them to feel really liberated to tell the brutal truth, however they see that truth and are moved to tell it.
When a colleague of mine had a notable New York Times book, I said, turn one of the chapters in the collection into a pitch for a novel and sell it to your publisher.
I want to keep looking at ways to stride forward with positivity.
The generation of women who came before us did much of our shouting. They laid the groundwork and now we can be calm and constant and steady.
Literature has done great work for feminism - writing and reading are a practice of empathy - and great literature will continue to do so.
The lessons learned in journalism also apply. Writing for NPR has taught me to cut a piece in half and then in half again - without losing the essence. Apply that to the swollen prose of a bulky novel and you might reveal a beautiful work.
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