Stuck with your novel? All of us get stuck from time to time; so this is for those occasions when you re-read a piece of writing and you know there is something wrong with it but you are not sure what it is.
Victorian inkwell
Continue reading Five Writing Tips for Getting Unstuck
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I’ve always thought of my parents as lost souls. My mother, age about two, was brought to a British refugee camp in Burma at the end of the war. My father was a year or so older when he was found by American soldiers wandering alone in the ruins of a burnt-out village in Eastern Europe in 1945. Neither of them had names or nationalities; they were just part of the human debris of the war. All that was known was that he was probably Polish and that she might be half-Burmese.
The Author Continue reading Learning the Language – a short story by Elizabeth Hawksley
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I’m thrilled to announce that Frost Fair is due to come out in e-books tomorrow, 7th December. It’s one of my favourite books and I was thrilled when it was short-listed for the Elizabeth Goudge Historical Novel Award in 2001. It is a first person novel which threw up a number of technical challenges, (it is my only first person novel).
Frost Fair, 1814, by Luke Clennell
Continue reading Frost Fair’s launch in e-books
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I’ve been thinking about Lydia’s role in Pride and Prejudice and I’ve come to the conclusion that she is far more important to the plot than it might seem at first sight. Lydia is entirely self-centred. She’s never sorry for anyone else, or ever considers anybody else’s point of view. She is concerned only with herself.
Basket of Fruit
Continue reading Jane Austen: Lydia Bennet’s role
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I am thrilled to announce the launch of The Belvedere Tower in e-books on Monday, October 5th.
‘The Belvedere Tower’ by Elizabeth Hawksley, e-book, 2020
Novelists need magpie minds – and I am no exception. So today I am looking at some of the elements which inspired me when writing The Belvedere Tower.
Continue reading My e-book launch of The Belvedere Tower
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I wrote six novels between the age of ten and sixteen and the stories just poured out but, every now and then, I’d stop and think about a particularly grown-up word I wanted to use and feel pleased with myself when I found it. Naturally, I always looked forward to the next Big Scene – like the love scenes – and I have to confess that the occasional renunciation love scene always left me in tears.
Port Carnow Cove, Cornwall, from print in E. Hawksley’s collection
Continue reading Writing Tips: avoiding an emotional vacuum
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If you need inspiration for a novel, you could do a lot worse than visit your nearest stately home. The magnificent Kenwood House, built in the 1760s by Robert Adam for the Earl of Mansfield, is not too far from where I live. It struck me that what novelists sometimes need is not an in depth knowledge of a stately home’s architectural highlights but a record of some of the everyday objects which a heroine would come across.
Rear of Kenwood House, showing the Orangerie
Continue reading Inspired by Kenwood House: Take a Heroine
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This is the week of my e-book launch of Highland Summer and I’d like to tell you a bit about the book.
I try to set myself a technical challenge with all my books and those of you who have been following my e-books story so far, will know that Highland Summer is where I intersperse the third person narrative with extracts from the heroine, Robina’s, journal, as I explained in my blog last week. It was fascinating to see how Robina’s character gradually changed as I allowed her to have her say in what was going on.
e-book cover for ‘Highland Summer’. I’m so thrilled it’s coming out tomorrow! Continue reading My e-book Launch of ‘Highland Summer’
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I am busy getting my Elizabeth Hawksley back list of ten historical novels into e-books The first e-book will be Highland Summer and I’ve been remembering the struggle to introduce my heroine, Robina (an intelligent but naive seventeen-year-old girl) in such a way as to make her interesting. The novel was in the third person and I was getting desperate. And then I had an idea: I would write Robina’s diary and see what happened. Perhaps a (temporary) first person viewpoint would help to free the block.
I’m stuck, dammit! What am I to do?
Continue reading Writing Tips: Getting a Character Unstuck
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On 10th May, I put up a post about my lockdown project of getting my Elizabeth Hawksley historical novels into e-books. Now, ten weeks later, the first book, Highland Summer is almost ready and it’s been a steep, not to say precipitous, learning curve. However, thanks to computer wizard John Hocking, and his wife Janet Gover, another computer wizard, both brilliant at explaining things, we are at last getting there.
Elizabeth looking apprehensive but trying not to show it. Photo by Sally Greenhill
Continue reading Elizabeth Hawksley e-books: Looking Good to Go
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