Writer's Voices

As for the number of refugees who’ve drowned or have gone missing while fleeing their country, Carstensen said we’ll probably never know. “With these refugee shipwrecks, it’s much more chaotic, you don’t know who was on the boat in the first place. You don’t know their names, you don’t know how many people… so in this incident, there were about 350 people in the water, we’ll never know the exact number, and then after the shipwreck, bodies are washing up for days… since 2014 in the Mediterranean, over 31,000 people have drowned or died or gone missing, and this is considered a drastic undercount, so imagine the families of these people… many times people don’t know what boat were they on, where they might’ve disappeared, and it’s so important for humans to be able to pay their last respects to their loved ones…”

Some people have said that my book is nonfiction with a novelistic feel to it because of how deeply you get to know the characters.”

You have to understand that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.”

For Krischer, telling other people’s stories has always been a fascination of hers. She explains why writing about the teenage demographic is of particular interest to her. “I sort of like to get into the teenage brain… I mean, I have a 16 year old daughter, but I started writing about teenage girls long before I had her and I think just my intense friendships with women and how important my female friendships have always been to me probably inspired me to start writing about going deeper into these relationships… I’m always looking at, sort of, the psychology of those friendships…”

Any book that I write, I would love to be able to just take a concept that can exist over time now or in 200 years from now.”

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”

Unlike Haigh’s other novels, Rabbit Moon is her first book to be set outside of the United States. While in Shanghai, Haigh spent a majority of her time writing the manuscript in public places, such as parks, teahouses, and restaurants. This allowed her to fully immerse in the environment and culture around her. Additionally, she was also able to focus solely on her writing because the languages spoken were so unfamiliar to her. She remarked, “Being out in public spaces, I could at least see people and feel life happening around me even if I couldn’t participate in it or communicate with anybody… So I think that is really what drew me out, and then what I found when I came out of my hole was so fascinating… this book is full of the kind of observation that is almost impossible to do when you’re writing about a familiar place. One of the advantages of travel is you get fresh eyes and for a writer that is a priceless thing. Also, because I could not understand [the] language, all I had was what I could observe and so it’s like losing a sense kind of sharpens your other senses in a way. I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but it felt that way.”

A novel always begins, and I think of this consciously when I’m writing, it begins with the moment after which nothing will ever be the same.”

Adoption has the dimension of connection – not only to your own tribe, but beyond, widening the scope of what constitutes love, ties, and family. It is a larger embrace.”

While the process can feel daunting and dismaying at times, Sweeney encourages his readers to keep pressing on and enjoy the journey no matter how challenging it may be. “The most important advice I would give is to know that it happens slowly and it’s a life practice… we think like the writing is something you devote yourself to, you spend tons of years doing it, and then you get published… and that’s not how it works, at least for me. Publishing is something that takes a really long time to figure out your relationship to it and it takes a really long time, especially, to know the landscape… Everyday you go back to it even in the face of the longness of the journey is a reminder that the journey itself is the purpose… You know you’ll find a solution and a home for your writing that you probably didn’t even imagine before, and it’ll be good.”

The thing that I like to highlight in this book especially if it’s sustaining possibilities of community, like when we connect with readers, we connect with other editors, and other writers, that’s a thing that really has the power to keep us going in life.”

In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.”

And how do I tie it together in a way that moves the story forward while also, kind of, adding all those little details on as we go.”

It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

As far as how Gruley begins crafting the plot of his novels, he said, “I have an idea of what happens at the beginning… some bad thing, and I know 2 or 3 characters… actually the first character I knew was Devyn Payne because I had written an entire novel before I started Bitterfrost in which Devyn was a major character… so I sort of knew Devyn… I know where I’m going to have a murder here… then, I invented Jimmy and then, of course, I needed a detective and so I created Garth Klimmek, and we’re off, right?” However, after completing the novel, he did have to make some major changes with the help of his editor. He explained, “..my editor came back to me and before we got into a full edit, she said, you know chapter 6, at that time chapter 6 was Jimmy lying on his kitchen floor, and she said, ‘I think you ought to make that chapter one.’ …in about 10 minutes I realized she was 100% correct… and now I think it’s the perfect start… I’m really glad Vic, Victoria, suggested that and you know, you’re in middle of this intense scene and you’re like, ‘What the hell happened?’ That’s what you want readers thinking. You pose questions and you’ll answer them eventually.”

Observation – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, that’s how you gather all the little details for writing scenes that bring the reader there. Readers like to be there.”

Half the game is mental, the other half is being mental.”

While the book does focus mainly on how online media impacts adolescents, Dr. Gansner also warns parents to be mindful of what they themselves view on the internet because they may read conflicting advice on how best to help their child. “…that can be so overwhelming for parents to see all these different things that their child should be doing differently, and to try to do all of them it can make you feel like you’re failing your child if you aren’t able to make certain things happen…” Therefore, rather than searching all over the internet for accurate information, Dr. Gansner hopes the compilation of research she delivers in her book will provide the answers that families are seeking. She remarked, “This book I was hoping in part could help those kids because by and large, they don’t seem to be looked at as much in studies. It’s far less likely for people to do studies specifically in youth that have underlying psychiatric conditions. Most of the research is in the general adolescent or the young adult populations, and so I really wanted this book to be for those families that I see.”

The vast majority of episodes of depression are thought to be caused by… various risk factors that all come together because you actually probably do have to have multiple of these risk factors to bring about an episode of depression.”

It’s ok to not be ok. Depression is a real illness and you are not alone.”

Aside from her life with Buddy, Mickle also writes about other moments in her life, including the time she contracted polio at the age of 6. She said, “In my year, 33,000 children got the virus and as soon as I was diagnosed, I was rushed to an isolation hospital… two children died near me because they couldn’t breathe… and so when that happened, even though I was the age of six I had this sudden realization I’m being saved for something… we need all ask ourselves what are we being saved for because life is so short… I want all people to get across the idea that pain and hardship are here to be enjoyed in a sense because the alternative is to check out, and life is so short… So you have to enjoy every minute of it, like T.R. Roosevelt said, ‘Take a bite out of it and let it dribble down your chin.'”

A laugh is considered a reflex, like a sneeze, a cough, or an eye blink, and those reflexes always protect us from something trying to get into our bodies that would be harmful.”

Twenty seconds of laughter is the equivalent in exercise of three minutes of strenuous rowing.”

Ferguson, who got her start in writing by attending a writer’s conferences, highly encourages all aspiring writers to participate in writing conferences. Her advice, “Get yourself to a writer’s conference as soon as you ever possibly think, ‘Wouldn’t it be kind of fun to write a book? I wonder if I could.’ Just go ahead and go, start early because there’s so many workshops and proposals… There’s so much to writing that is beyond just writing, but also in commercial publishing there are a lot of rules to it that you may not know that you would learn at conferences, so don’t be afraid to get out there to a good writer’s conference and learn and get connected, meet other people…” And lastly and most importantly, “Just keep writing… other authors kept saying that, but to me I didn’t really quite get it, but just keep writing… write the next book!”

While a career in writing is something Casati has always aspired to, she has found that there are still some challenges that come with the territory. She remarked, “…whenever I struggle I tell myself, ‘As soon as you you were 5 years old you wanted to be an author so you have it now, you cannot complain…’ Sometimes it is hard in the sense that, you know, when you have amazing readers who expect something from you… I think once you reach that level as an author, that there are always people who want you to write certain things… My team is fantastic and I love them… and they kind of follow me on this adventure and they respect my wishes… but you need to stand up for yourself… pitch your projects so that other people will be as obsessed with them as you are. You need to convince other people that what you’re working on is going to be successful even if you don’t know it yourself.”

There’s an amazing quote by [the] poet Robert Frost, ‘If there are no tears, if there is no emotion in the writer, there will be no emotion in the reader,’ and I know that if I don’t have this strong emotional reaction to a story, my readers won’t either.”

Writing is the mother of eloquence and the father of artists.”