Words matter. These are the best Susanna Kearsley Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls.
There was no DVR, no Netflix, and no binge-watching. We didn’t even have a VCR till I was nearly out of high school.
In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.
The best way to show an emotion is not through a character’s words, but their smallest expressions – to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to ‘see.’
How much of our lives is consumed with meeting people, attracting people, keeping people and missing people? Usually, when everything is resolved romantically in one of my books, the characters stop talking in my head, and I stop telling the story.
When I’m dealing with the 18th century, as I do in ‘The Firebird,’ the difficulty isn’t only finding what a woman did, it’s finding her at all. Most of the sources I’m dealing with – letters and memoirs and written reports of the day – have been written by men.
I grew up in a very small town where nearly everyone knew each other, and odds were that whatever you said about a person would make it back to them by nightfall – something incomers learned, to their frequent embarrassment.
Even a writer like me, who, in ‘The Firebird,’ is telling the story of people who’ve been dead for nearly three centuries, needs to take care. Those people may not be around any longer to tell me what actually happened, but neither are they able to defend themselves against unjust portrayals.
Such is the endless dilemma of dialect. Not every reader will ever agree with the way that I handle it, no matter how hard I work to keep everything readable. But again it’s that balance I have to maintain between keeping it easy and keeping it real, and I know that I’ll never please everyone.
I can have my day carefully planned, but if someone wakes up with a cough or a sniffle, then everything changes. Thinking quickly and adapting without grumbling are essential skills to learn, in my opinion.
When you say that you write romantic fiction, there are a lot of people who have an image in their mind of the ‘bodice ripper.’ It’s the one term that most romantic fiction writers absolutely hate because it has no bearing on what people are writing.
As a former waitress myself, I know firsthand how a simple smile from someone can improve your day and how a single harsh word can destroy it. Being courteous and thoughtful costs you nothing and can sometimes pay you dividends in unexpected ways.
If it hadn’t been for Bill Macdonald’s book ‘The True Intrepid,’ I might never have found out about the women who went down to work in secret in New York for our own spymaster Sir William Stephenson in the Second World War.
I spent five years of my childhood in Port Elgin and came back to spend another five years of my young adulthood there as well, including the years in which I was first published.
People didn’t just wear wedding dresses in the past. They also wore plain cotton shifts beneath them. As pretty as the dresses might be, and as lovely as they might look on display, if a museum doesn’t hang the shifts beside them or acknowledge that the shifts existed, that exhibit’s incomplete.
One of the more interesting challenges I face when doing research for my novels is to trace the lives of women who are vital to the narrative and try my best to give them back their voices.
I once walked through an exhibit in a large American museum that displayed First Nations artifacts in old dioramas, with mannequins that hadn’t been changed since the 19th century.
It’s the pursuit of love and happiness that is the driving force of the romantic novel.
I have seen and really liked the varied movie adaptations of the book, but ‘Little Women’ has a sprawling, richly tangled story that needs time and space to weave its magic.
The recent controversy over the portrayal of Ken Taylor and his embassy staff in the movie ‘Argo’ brought home to me the great responsibility we writers have when telling stories that involve real people.
