Wednesday, April 11, 2012

My Post on Hoosier Ink Today

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.

http://hoosierink.blogspot.com 



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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