Literary Birthday – 24 March – Mary Balogh

Happy Birthday, Mary Balogh, born 24 March 1944.

Mary Balogh Quotes

1. My advice to anyone wanting to write historical fiction is to do extensive research, both of history books and of contemporary literature. Immerse yourself in that world and avoid the temptation to write a contemporary novel dressed up in period costume. EVERYTHING will be different about that historical age except human nature itself. Characters and situation must seem authentic. (Book Notions)
2. I was a voracious reader, and even before I could write I used to make up stories which I enacted in my head when lying in bed at night. It was how I put myself to sleep. Once I could write, I used to fill blank notebooks (a favourite Christmas and birthday gift) with long, long stories about children having wonderful adventures and always coming out triumphant. (Book Notions)
3. When anyone asked me what I hoped to be when I grew up, I would say I wanted to be an author (though in those days I used the word “authoress”). (Book Notions)
4. Writers’ block is something that strikes every single day. When I sit down to continue my story, there is always a great blank in my mind and I don’t know where to start or how to start. I deal with the problem by exerting a rigid discipline on myself. I refuse to recognize the block and will never give in to it, no matter how tempted I may want to go and put in a load of laundry or take the day off in the hope that by tomorrow inspiration will have hit. I sit there until I have thought my way back into the story and the main characters’ minds and can carry them forward. (Book Notions)
5. Writing for me is a deeply personal process. I could never involve anyone else in any way at all. No one sees my manuscript before the book is written. I know there are co-writers who produce successful books and enjoy the process. It is proof of the fact that we are all very different from one another. I can’t give advice to other writers for that very reason. Each writer has to find what works for her/him. (Book Notions)
6. Every author is unique, however, even if she/he has taken inspiration from another. Each writer has an individual voice and vision. I have spent more than thirty years developing and honing my own while writing more than a hundred novels and novellas, most of them set in the Regency era. (Penguin Random House)
7. I have always been a writer. And what I should write has never been in question. I have to write about love and its triumph over adversity and all the outer and inner forces that would smother it if they could. I write love stories without apology and without self-doubt. (Penguin Random House)
8. To me, the romance, the passion of the romance between two people, is the be-all and end-all of a book. I never allow plot or setting or certainly other characters to interfere with the romance. To me it’s such an exciting thing. I can’t understand when I read books sometimes that the plot has become so important to the writer that the romance sort of gets lost. (All About Romance)
9. In a romance, the focus is the love story. It’s right on center stage. Everything else fades in significance around it. A romance has to have a happy ending. (All About Romance)

Mary Balogh is a Welsh-Canadian novelist who writes historical romance. Her debut novel, A Masked Deception, was published in 1985. She won the Romantic Times Award for best new Regency writer in that year. She is the author of more than 60 published novels and over 30 novellas, and has been met with critical success. They include the Bedwyn saga, the Simply quartet, the Huxtable quintet, the seven-part Survivors’ Club series, the Westcott series, and the Ravenswood series. Her historical fiction is set in the Regency era and the wider Georgian era. Balogh has received numerous awards, including a Romantic Times Career Achievement Award for Regency Short Stories and has appeared 37 times on The New York Times Best Seller list. Her latest novel is Remember That Day. Follow her on Facebook.

Source for image: Mary Balogh’s Website

by Amanda Patterson

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