Literary Birthday – 17 June – Kerry Greenwood

Happy Birthday, Kerry Greenwood, born 17 June 1954.

Five Quotes

  1. Self-doubt, exhaustion, and confusion are part of the process, embrace them, and don’t stop writing to examine what you have. The world is full of people trying to perfect chapter one.
  2. If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, ‘Wake up and write the book!’
  3. My own view is that everyone works too hard and too long and they ought to get out more. There isn’t time in their impoverished lives to do anything creative, or even to just sit and stare, one of my favourite occupations. And how the wired-in young—never without their music, never out of touch because of mobile phones, constantly sharing everything, even pictures—are going to cope if they ever encounter solitude and silence is another thing.
  4. I want a story with a happy ending, so I usually have to write it myself. Actually criminal ideas occur to everyone, especially if you are sitting in a vastly over-extended meeting with a maddening person who is going on and on and you know if you protest they will just get worse, and so one thinks of lots of interesting ways to kill them. I, at least, can call this ‘research’.
  5. [I write] in a small office at the front  of my small house, where I can see people walking past. In a nice seaside cottage I just stare at the sea. I once tried to shut myself away to write a book and nearly went off my head with loneliness. I need a nice urban landscape, with passing cats.

Kerry Greenwood is an Australian author and solicitor. She has written many plays and books, most notably a string of historical detective novels centred on the character of Phryne Fisher. She lives with a ‘registered wizard’. She is the author of Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher.

Source for Image: Publishers

by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 17th June 2013
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