“Never trust a storyteller,” Jonathan Gottschall says in The Story Paradox. There are a number of reasons he says this but primary among them is that we’re always manipulating the story for maximum effect. We think about what details to emphasize and which to downplay. We spend a lot of time deciding which rock will…
Author: Jennifer Lawler
The evolution of a character
I originally conceived of Lucinda (from The Wanderer) as a younger character who has a kind of naïve faith that things will work out. Possibly this is because I started writing her years ago when I had a kind of naïve faith that things would work out. But as Lucinda’s story evolved from a simpler…
The stress of writing something worthy of the special journal
The notebook I’m currently writing in has a little golden retriever puppy playing with a ball on the cover. I ran out of writing materials on my recent travels and my daughter had an extra notebook so she let me use hers. I feel like I need to write something really excellent in order to…
The power of choice
As the novelist Haruki Murakami says, “By viewing it through an unreal lens, the world looks more real.” One of the reasons I enjoy writing fantasy and paranormal and have basically given up writing contemporary romance is because fantastical settings allow me to explore big questions in a way that isn’t mundane or implausible. I…
The watchers
A flaneur is a person who walks through a city observing life rather than partaking of it, and I think to some degree all writers and indeed artists in general are flaneurs. We do seem to be a little separate from others, watching without joining in. Even when we do join in there is part…
Ye gods!
When I started writing The Wanderer, I didn’t expect to wind up featuring gods to the extent that the story does. At first I thought of it as an historical romance set in medieval England, which would make all of the characters Catholic. Religion didn’t play that much of a role in the story itself,…