What is the title
of your latest book? What is it about?
GIRL
FRIENDS is a YA novel. The protagonist is fifteen year old Courtney who looking
for love and good marks in school. Home life is tough, but at least she has her
best friend Grace. Grace however has other fish to fry, mostly in the form of a
new, older, boyfriend who promises to get her the right contacts to fulfill her
ambition to be a model. Is Courtney right to be worried about what Grace is
getting herself into? Or is she just jealous?
What are the most
challenging aspects of being a writer? And the most rewarding?
I
find sticking with my intended plot outline quite a challenge – the characters
often decide to do something completely different. Usually, unless it would
mean completely re-writing the book (and that has happened!) I go with the flow
and tweak the plot outline accordingly.
My
most rewarding experience was when my son read the first draft of my first YA
book, And Alex Still has Acne – and said
it was quite good! Praise indeed from him; he wouldn’t have hesitated to tell
his mother she was writing rubbish if that was what he thought. He did make a
few useful suggestions as well, after all he had been a teenager a lot more
recently than I had.
What is your top
tip for an aspiring writer?
Read
plenty of novels, especially from the genre you want to write in. Read for
pleasure, but then think about what worked / didn’t work for you in that
particular book before you move onto the next one.
What are you
working on at the moment?
I
am working on a series of short stories, based around some of Shakespeare’s
female characters. What they were up to when we don’t see them on stage. Some
have already been published. Chains of
Magic, about Desdemona and Othello was in the Food of Love anthology, published by Solstice. Another one, based
on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, will be in their 2016 summer anthology). I hope
to have enough stories completed over the next few months to be published as a
collection which I have provisionally titled Cast Off. It would be great
if I could get it all together as my contribution to the events marking this
year’s 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.
What do you like
to read?
I
will read almost anything from cereal packets to dictionaries rather than sit
and not read. I like the classics (Jane Austen, George Eliot) but will also
read new novels (Anne Tyler – A Spool of Blue Thread). I like non-fiction too
and have not long read two books by Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly
Everything and Mother Tongue. I love the way he conveys so much information in
such an engaging way. I have nearly finished Helen Macdonald’s, H is for Hawk,
which is about her coming to terms with grief for the death of her father
through training a hawk.
Where can readers
find you?
Nearly
all my published work is available from Amazon:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/meegrot
Website: www.margaretegrotwriter.weebly.com
Blog:
www.writingandbreathing.wordpress.com
This looks very good. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteHello niice blog
ReplyDelete