Live The Questions – Q&A for Big Girls Don’t Cry: A Memoir of Taking Up Space
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction (CSPF): Was it hard to get the right cover? What inspired the image of lemons?
Susan Swan: Covers are like posters for your book. If you don’t get it right, fewer people will buy it, so that’s why editors and writers sweat over what works and what doesn’t. One writer I know went through 25 different covers before they were satisfied. We wanted to come up with something new. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what the pink lemon means.
CSPF: How different is writing a memoir from writing a novel?
Susan: Not as different as you might think. Both forms dramatize and distill, so you need to write actual scenes instead of reciting a litany of events. The big difference is the detailed way lawyers will check over your manuscript to ensure you aren’t compromising someone’s privacy. Memoirs can be court cases waiting to happen.
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Living the Questions: Should You Have Children if You Want to Write?
Years ago, a science-fiction writer named Judith Merrill told me she couldn’t write after her children left home. Without the structure children imposed on her day, she was lost. My daughter Sam transformed my day too. In order to raise her and write fiction I had to learn to say no to other people’s expectations. …
Living the Questions: How Do Writers Make a Living?
This new series on the blog is inspired by the poet Ranier Maria Rilke, who wrote in a letter to a toiling poet: “Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, live along …