Literary Ladies Guide

In Thunder and Lightening: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft, Natalie Goldberg offers advice on how to find time to write. She suggests structuring your time — strictly!  Be precise, set your writing time up in advance, and take that time commitment seriously:

“… Don’t ever say you’ll write every day because when you don’t — and I promise you, there will be days you won’t — you’ll hate yourself. Let’s push it further — where will you write? At the Blue Moon Café? OK, you’ve made a date, and like any other — with the dentist, the accountant, the hairdresser — you have to keep it. You’re committed, it’s in your appointment book.”

Finding time to write has always been a concern, especially for women, who traditionally raised the kids, kept the house, and cared for aging parents. And sometimes, wrote to pay the bills before they allowed themselves to write for self-expression. Read More→

Eudora Welty (1909 – 2001) was just as avid a reader as she was a writer. It isn’t hard to see how reading thoughtfully can make one a better thinker and writer.

Welty won numerous awards for her writing, among them, a Pulitzer Prize (for The Optimist’s Daughter, 1973 — which many critics considered her best novel), an American Book Award, National Medal for Literature, and The Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was a six-time winner of the O. Henry Award for Short Stories.

Welty dispensed gentle wisdom on the subject of how being a good writer is intertwined with the love of reading. Here are several of her ideas on the art of reading gathered from her nonfiction books, notably On Writing and One Writer’s Beginnings. Read More→

From her disapproving mother and wayward husband to her snooty society friends, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) lived in a social milieu that reinforced her deep insecurity and sense of non-belonging, both as a woman and as a writer.

Her first tentative steps into the literary world, the place she most longed to be, met with steady acceptance and success that took her by surprise. It took quite some doing before Wharton believed she was worthy of it.

The publication of Wharton’s first collection of fictional short stories, The Greater Inclination, seemed to turn the tide as she finally accepted herself as a professional writer and not a dilettante. Read More→

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896 – 1953), the Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and memoirist was known for her writings about her adopted home of Cross Creek, Florida, where she bought an orange grove in the late 1920s and lived for many decades.

She was fascinated by the people and local culture, and gathered her observations into Cross Creek, the memoir discussed here, and a compilation of recipes, Cross Creek Cookery. Both were published in 1942.

Rawlings was attracted to the people of Cross Creek, who were called crackers (though at the time, this wasn’t a disparaging term). At first they were wary of her as an outsider and  resisted her eager questions and interest. Eventually they warmed to her, and she began recording detailed descriptions of the people, their dialect, the flora and fauna, and the local food and folkways. Read More→

The Professor’s House by Willa Cather, published in 1925, is one of this American master’s mid-career novels. The story of Professor Godfrey St. Peter, one might say it tells of a midlife crisis before the term was coined.

When the professor and his wife move into a new house, he begins questioning the path that his life has taken. His daughters have grown up, and he loses much of his will to live, not finding anything to look forward to. 

Though it hasn’t achieved the enduring stature of some of Cather’s better-known works, The Professor’s House, in her skilled hands it becomes a touching story of personal and spiritual self-reflection. Read More→

Lucy Maud (L.M.) Montgomery, author of the ever-popular Anne of Green Gables, was a keen letter-writer. Her letters to George Boyd MacMillan over their thirty-nine year friendship show the full range of her interests, from domestic concerns, her cats, and gardening, to her professional literary career as best-selling author.

When L.M. Montgomery receives  the first letter from G.B. MacMillan (in 1903), she is coping with her domestic responsibilities and is struggling to establish herself as a poet and short-story writer with major American and Canadian magazines. Read More→

For Anaïs Nin, writing was essential as breathing. This need inspired her multi-volume The Diary of Anaïs Nin series. What started as a voyage of self-discovery eventually transcended the personal into the universal.

Her diaries became a touchstones for a generation of women (and Nin became a feminist icon), not merely one woman’s private quest for identity and meaning.

By the standards of today’s confessional media, Nin’s frank writings may no longer seem as revolutionary as they did just a generation ago. In the final volume of the Diary (Volume Seven, 1966 –1974), she delighted in sharing snippets from the countless letters of gratitude she received from women everywhere, in all walks of life: Read More→

Even after Louisa May Alcott had already achieved fame as an author, she continued to answer letters from readers.  Louisa seemed rather smitten with her own narrative and didn’t mind repeating it for her own benefit and that of others.

She was generous in her advice to aspiring writers — readers of her work, especially young women — who sought words of wisdom for achieving success.

On occasion, Louisa professed disdain for writing what she called “moral tales,” but any reluctance on her part gave way to willingness to write them anyway, because, as she said, they paid well. The money she earned allowed her to care for her dear mother and family.

There’s no easy road to success

Here’s a response Louisa sent to one female reader, a Miss Churchill, asking her advice on achieving success. It was written on Christmas Day, circa 1878:

“I can only say to you as I do to the many young writers who ask for advice —there is no easy road to successful authorship; it has to be earned by long and patient labor, many disappointments, uncertainties and trials. Success is often a lucky accident, coming to those who may not deserve it, while others who do have to wait & hope till they have earned it. This is the best sort and the most enduring.”

. . . . . . . . . .

I worked for twenty years …

“I worked for twenty years poorly paid, little known, and quite without any ambition but to eke out a living, as I chose to support myself and begin to do it at sixteen.

This long drill was of use, and when I wrote Hospital Sketches [see LMA’s Civil War Journals] by the beds of my soldier boys in the shape of letters home I had no idea that I was taking the first step toward what is called fame. Read More→