Sheila's Guests and Reviews

Sometimes they tell you to write what you know. My husband says I should write about moving from England to the US. I think I write about displacement instead, and locate it wherever my characters tell me to. But I guess there's always something of what I know, delving into the shadows of dreams to let my characters make sense of them. Sometimes they tell you to set your imagination free. Don't tie yourself to the boring facts you know. Though, of course, those facts might not be entirely boring. My imagination's been wandering since the day I learned to talk. Reining it in might be the problem. Sometimes they tell you just to write. That's the rule I found hardest of all. It seems like all the writers I meet have delighted in journaling their days. But I have a box filled with empty diaries, where my journaling lasted a mere three weeks or less. One of them has checkmarks for the days when I thought I'd been good. That's the one that lasted the whole three week...

A friend told me once that she hears my voice whenever she reads my writing. It's a woman's voice with an English accent of course, and my friend says she likes it. But I wonder sometimes, how will I write a Texan if my accent stays the same? I know I can write with more than just one English accent. Sometimes I leave off endings of words, skip syllables or sounds and write Mancunian. Other times I'll be prim and proper and write a landed Londoner with a mouth full of plums and silver spoons. But what if my character's an American teenager, like in my Hemlock Edge stories. Will everyone hear the words with an English accent, or will only my friends? I've read a few books recently where the written accent was very much part of the tale. What's Really Hood , edited by Wahida Clark, is a book of street stories told in the language of the streets. What impressed me particularly was how easily readable it was, the narrative text maintaining the same street accent til...