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Forming Your Identity as a Writer

Do You Have to Make Money from Your Writing to be a “Real Writer”?

“So, what do you do?” is a common question in society that makes most creative people cringe. Whether you’re socializing at a dinner party with friends or you’re meeting your significant other’s parents for the first time, the “what do you do?” question is one that we’ve all come to know and expect, and that fills us with dread every time.

For most people, answering this question is easy. They give the person their job title and maybe the company they work at and then the conversation moves on. But for creative people, it’s very likely that their official job title does not match what they are most passionate about in life, and their job title is not the work they truly identify with on a deeper level. So, the job title they have at the moment feels irrelevant, and mostly impersonal. It doesn’t say anything about who they really are. Continue Reading

1 April, 2022 by

Women Writers in Transgressive Fiction: The Times They Are A Changin’

The first book I ever wrote was ugly as hell. It was raw, disgusting, weird, and twisted. In fact, when I first started writing it I didn’t even know what it was. I thought maybe it was a memoir, because it was all about a certain period in my life, but I could also see that it was so fragmented and exaggerated in places that thinking of it as an actual linear story was quite a stretch, even for my imagination.

I worked on it every week for two years but I kept it a secret. I hid the pages I wrote in a locked desk drawer and never looked at them. I was too embarrassed, and ashamed. I knew the writing was bad, that was one thing, but I also didn’t want to look at the demons that were showing up. I didn’t want to know what those demons were trying to tell me. Continue Reading

10 October, 2018 by

How Do You Know When It’s Time to Give Up on Your Dream of Being a Writer?

A few years ago, in 2015, I hit a wall with writing. I had just given birth to my son a few months before, I was completely exhausted all the time, and I had been querying on multiple novels for years, with no success. I had done everything I thought I was supposed to do. Joined and founded writing groups, worked with beta readers, steeled myself through harsh critique, edited and revised my manuscripts until it felt like my eyes were going to bleed, and still…nothing.

I felt like a complete failure. Continue Reading

7 August, 2018 by

Writers with Imposter Syndrome: You Are Not Alone

You are such a fraud.

As a writer, how many times have you heard your inner critic say that to you whenever someone compliments your work? What if your work comes up for an award or you get an awesome review from a total stranger?

How about the times you hear that phrase just because you dared to say out loud to someone that you—yes, YOU—are a writer?

For me, it has been thousands and THOUSANDS of times. Continue Reading

19 February, 2018 by

What It’s Like to Be a Female Author Who Writes Transgressive Fiction

Every time I tell someone I write transgressive fiction the first question I get is, “What’s transgressive fiction?” If we’re talking in person, I explain it as best I can (usually not very well). But if we’re emailing I send them the definition cut and pasted from Wikipedia:

Transgressive fiction is a genre of literature which focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual or illicit ways.

Because they are rebelling against the basic norms of society, protagonists of transgressive fiction may seem mentally ill, anti-social, or nihilistic. The genre deals extensively with taboo subject matters such as drugs, sexual activity, violence, incest, pedophilia, and crime.

That definition is actually a very good one. It definitely covers all the bases. However, every time I send it to someone to explain the kind of fiction I write, I feel weird. Continue Reading

15 February, 2018 by