Just a note to let you know that I'm posting on ACFW Indiana's blog, Hoosier Ink today about author Sally Wright and what she had to say about writing in the middle of dealing with pancreatic cancer. Important words.
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| http://hoosierink.blogspot.com |
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| Author Sally Wright |
Sally Wright started writing “adventure stories” at
the age of six when her mother taught her to touch-type so Wright would amuse
herself while her parents worked at their small family business. Wright turned
to writing songs when she was sixteen, performing them in the late sixties and
early seventies while she got her degree in speech at Northwestern University
in Evanston, Illinois and she did graduate work at the University of Washington
in Seattle. “Making music helped me
learn to write prose. Shaping lyrics in
a rhyme scheme, in a tight concise framework, helped me to understand rhythm
and how to use images in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise.”
Wright wrote while she raised two children “on a flat piece
of Ohio farm land” where she still lives with her husband of almost 30 years
and a boxer dog named Maggie. She writes
eight hours a day and then walks her dog or rides her one-eyed horse.
Yet, while she brushes Max, the horse, or walks the
woods with Maggie, she’s thinking about character and personality. “Even as a kid, I loved asking adults about
their lives and their family history. That’s why I’ve enjoyed writing biography
articles for magazines—I like interviewing people who’ve done things that never
would’ve occurred to me. That’s one of
the best things about writing the Ben Reese novels—I interview all sorts of
people and learn all kinds of new things that help me come up with stories that
seem worth telling to me.”
Good mysteries make us turn pages, and Wright’s
definitely do that with cleverly crafted plots that vivisect human nature. For Wright’s novels “grow from the
characters,” with a depth and detail that makes them real and compelling.
Although Wright
does read mysteries in her spare time, it’s the classics – Austen and Tolstoy
and many others—that she returns to again and again. The works of C.S. Lewis have been of
tremendous importance to Wright too, his fiction as well as his
non-fiction. “I’m trying to do with
mysteries what he’s done with children’s books and science fiction—talk about
life in its largest context while telling an exciting story.”
Bibliography
Novels
Publish And
Perish
Pride And
Predator
Articles
“The Pilgrimage of Malcolm Muggeridge” Chronicles, December 1992
“Robert Woodson: Establishing Enterprise In the Inner-City”
The World and I, May 1992
“Legacy Of A Dark Lord A review of Russell Kirk’s
novel, Lord of the Hollow Dark” The
University Bookman Vol. 30, Number 4 1990
“Nikolai Tolstoy: Writing in the Tolstoy Tradition” Chronicles, April 1989
“The Vision and Inventions of Albert Calderon” Metropolitan Toledo, March 1988
“Clyde and Marian Sluhan: Building a Business
Together” Metropolitan Toledo, July-August
1988
“The Mind Behind the Machines” Metropolitan Toledo, September-October 1988
“Hunter’s Run: A Home for Both Horses and Riders” Metropolitan Toledo, Spring 1989
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