While novelist Mary Anna Evans believes that studying writing is "very valuable," she also advises writers "to go out and live your life." She says that "all experience is useful" in writing.

And she should know. Mary Anna's books have drawn on her former engineering career and her interest in archaeology, among other experiences. 

Mary Anna's favorite writing prompt will help writers of all backgrounds and genres explore setting. She's successfully used it with fiction and nonfiction students and even environmental architecture students.

About Mary Anna Evans

Mary Anna Evans is an award-winning author with a PhD in English literature, a handy background for writing The Dark Library, the story of a woman menaced by her dead father, a literature professor whose rare book collection holds the secret to escaping him.

Her crime fiction has earned recognition including two Oklahoma Book Awards, the Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award, the Mississippi Author Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, and three Florida Book Awards bronze medals.

In addition to writing crime fiction, she writes about crime fiction, as evidenced by the Edgar, Agatha, Macavity, and HRF Keating Award-nominated Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie, co-edited with J.C. Bernthal. Bloomsbury will publish her Agatha Christie and the 20th Century Woman: Rewriting Female Justice in 2027.