Anna Elliott

About Anna Elliott

Anna Elliott is an author of historical fiction and fantasy. Her first series, the Twilight of Avalon trilogy, is a retelling of the Trystan and Isolde legend. She wrote her second series, the Pride and Prejudice Chronicles, chiefly to satisfy her own curiosity about what might have happened to Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Darcy, and all the other wonderful cast of characters after the official end of Jane Austen's classic work. She enjoys stories about strong women, and loves exploring the multitude of ways women can find their unique strengths. Anna lives in the Washington DC area with her husband and three children.

Let it Go

September 4, 2014 By Anna Elliott

I have two daughters, ages 5 and 7, which means– as people with similarly aged daughters will probably tell you– that we like the movie Frozen in our house. A lot. We do not even have a television, and I have still heard the signature song Let it Go so many times that I click my teeth to it while folding laundry. My husband absent-mindedly whistles it while writing computer code. If my 8 mos. old opened his mouth and ‘let it go’ came out instead of the standard ‘ah-boo, ah- BOO’, I wouldn’t be surprised. The incipient muscle-spasm in my right eye would develop into a full-blown twitch, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

However. Sometime last month as I was putting on a Frozen-themed birthday party for my 5 year old and buying her a Queen Elsa snowglobe wand that plays . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . . Let it Go (because apparently I am a masochist), I started listening to the song’s lyrics in a different light. Listening and realizing that the words to the song actually offer some pretty solid advice about writing.

For your sanity and mine, I won’t recap the plot of the movie except to say that Elsa, the character who sings Let it Go, is for most of her life ruled by fear. She’s afraid of her own magical powers– afraid what other people will think if they ever learn about her powers. She spends her life hiding, for fear someone will discover the truth. Let it Go is what she sings when she’s accidentally given herself away– when she realizes that she has nothing to lose, that she can’t hide anymore, and can finally Let it Go.

As writers, I think there are so many times when it’s easy to be similarly ruled by fear. It can be as simple (yet scary) as having to admit to others that we are writers. Before I landed my first contract, I practically NEVER confessed to writing books. Ever. “I’m a free-lance editor,” I would say when people asked what I did. It took my husband’s tough-love approach to break me of that one. “This is my wife Anna,” he would say, whenever we met someone new. “She’s an author.” Of course people would then ask what kind of books I wrote, and I would feel totally stupid and always kind of want to stab myself with a rusty fork rather than answer– but of course I would (answer that is, not stab myself with a fork) in stammering, tongue-tied sentences. But you know what? [Read more…]

Write Faster (and Better, Too)

July 3, 2014 By Anna Elliott

Have you read Rachel Aaron’s book 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love yet? You really should– it’s great.

Shortest. WU post. Ever!

Just kidding. But not about my recommendation of Rachel Aaron’s book, it really is well worth checking out. Now just to be clear, I don’t know Rachel at all, never met her, never even e-mailed with her. I hadn’t heard of her or her book until another author whose blog I follow mentioned that she was giving the strategies recommended in the book a try. This was six months ago, just after we’d had our third baby, and frankly anything that promised to help me write more efficiently in the obviously limited time I had sounded well worth looking into. So I downloaded the book and dove in.

It’s been awesome. Seriously. In the six months since my sweet baby boy was born, I’ve written two full-length books and am just this month finishing up a third. I wouldn’t say that’s entirely due to having read 2k to 10K, since there are so many other factors that go into a creative streak. (If anyone has others to share, let me know; I would LOVE to be that productive all the time). But (I know I’m sounding kind of like an infomercial here, but it’s really true) the strategies Rachel recommends have helped hugely for sure.

I admit that I was skeptical at first of the title. 10K in a day? I’m not sure I could ever write a book that fast. I’m not sure if I did write a book that fast it would be worth asking anyone, even my mother, to read it. Every writer is different, and I’m sure there are those who can write faster and still write well. But I’ve found I have to live with my characters and my story for a certain amount of time before I really understand them and can do them justice. If you feel the same, I completely understand that. Good stories take time. But the book isn’t about trying to boost your output willy-nilly up to 10k, forget about quality, it’s really not. I’m not currently writing 10K a day or anything like, but the strategies have helped me consistently write 2K in the same amount of time I used to take to write more like 1,000 words. That’s still a speed I’m comfortable with, but it is also helping me finish the books twice as fast. More importantly, the techniques don’t just bolster your word count. I mean, we could all just add a minimum of 2 adjectives to modify every noun we write and call it good. (~~He sat on the chair~~. He sat on the big, red chair. Look! More words!) More words isn’t the point; for me, the strategies really do make the writing better.

Okay, so what does the book actually say? Rachel’s strategies are really simple– so simple I was kind of smacking myself in the head and wondering why, 10 books into my career as an author, I’d never thought of that. But that makes them all the easier to implement. Here are my two favorites: [Read more…]

Your Inner Reader Knows What to Skip

May 1, 2014 By Anna Elliott

Elmore Leonard famously said of his writing: “I try to leave out the parts people skip.” Solid advice for writers of all levels of experience. But what exactly are “the parts people skip?” How do you identify whether you’re managing to leave them out of your writing or not?

I had a couple of encounters this past month that immediately made me think about that quote– and made me think about its relevance in a new light. The first was a conversation I had with my oldest daughter a couple of weeks ago. We were about to start reading a book together–one that my daughter had already read by herself and wanted to share with me– and I cracked open the cover and started reading the prologue.

Bella: Why are you reading that?

Me: Because the author wrote it. She thought it was important enough to work hard writing it, so we should think it’s important enough to read.
[Bella sighs. If thought bubbles could appear in the air over people’s heads the way they do in cartoons, hers would read “Oh help, my mother is talking like an author again.”]
Bella: Mom, look. *patiently flips pages and points to the words ‘Chapter 1’* This is where the story starts. Right here.

That’s kind of profound, if you think about it. My daughter is seven. She’s only been reading novel-length books independently for somewhere around a year and a half. And yet she’s already come to the conclusion (not from me, obviously) that prologues are something to be skipped, that the actual ‘story’ starts with Chapter 1. Which happens to be exactly the argument made by people (Elmore Leonard was, in fact, one of them) who claim that prologues should be avoided.

Which brings me to my second encounter of the month. [Read more…]

Open Mode

March 6, 2014 By Anna Elliott

I recently watched a video of John Cleese’s lecture on the five requirements for creativity. If you haven’t seen it before, I highly recommend it. It’s both insightful and hilarious (it is John Cleese, after all) and well worth the 30 minutes or so of your time. One of the requirements Cleese mentions is the necessity of getting your brain into what he terms ‘open mode’ or the mode of thinking in which you can be creative. That resonated with me particularly, since if there’s one area of writing I struggle with, I would say that it’s getting into– and staying in– open mode.

Hopefully I’m not alone in saying this, but even though writing is my dream job and I truly couldn’t love it more– even though I’ve written and published 10 books at this point– even still, when I sit down at my keyboard, I’m usually struck by an overwhelming urge to avoid writing. Why? I’m not even sure. Fear, maybe– fear that the magic isn’t going to happen and everything I’m going to write will be atrociously stupid? (I also hope I’m not alone in saying that basically every single book I write, I reach a point where I tell my husband/writing partner/mother, “So, isn’t it interesting that I’m writing the worst book in the history of the world?” )

At any rate, pushing through that fear, that desire to do anything on the face of the earth except work on my beloved story is probably my biggest challenge. Of course I do it, every single day, because I’m also pretty much compulsive about achieving my daily word count goals. But it’s still hard. At any rate, though, these last couple of months I’ve been forced by necessity to really pay attention to how quickly and thoroughly I can get my brain into open mode and start being creative. I have a 2 mos. old baby– as well as two older kids– home with me full-time, which means that any time I do manage to get into open mode, I’m likely to get snapped out of it fairly quickly by some small person needing me. If I get 20 minutes to write, I need to write for at least 19 of them, not fritter away 10 checking e-mail and trying to convince myself to just open the darn Scrivener file and start typing. It’s been good, actually, in that I’ve developed some strategies that seem to help. Here they are, in no particular order: [Read more…]

The School of Happy Endings

January 2, 2014 By Anna Elliott

Today I want to talk about endings– or more specifically, an odd phenomenon about novel endings that I’ve noticed. At least, I think it’s odd. Generally speaking– and I’m sure authors of category romance books could probably speak to this issue even more than I can– there seems to be a widely-held view that happy endings are somehow inherently less ‘meaningful’ or ‘literary’ than sad ones. I remember once reading an interview with Sue Monk Kidd about her breakout debut The Secret Life of Bees in which she described struggling with the novel’s ending. Her gut as an author was pulling for a happy ending, but she felt an external pressure to make it end badly– as she put it, “I was influenced, too, by my impression (right or wrong) that “happy endings” in literary novels were often sneered at.”

Now, I’m not for a moment suggesting that sad endings are not meaningful or literary or worthwhile to write and to read. Good grief no. If this past year has taught me anything, it’s that all the ‘happiness is a choice’ stuff is sometimes a big fat lie. Sure, happiness is often a choice we can make– I would even say more often than we think. But there are also times when happiness is simply not a possible option . . . times when all you can do is sit with the sad, accept that it has something important to tell you, if you have the courage to hear. It’s just this odd (to me, anyway) notion that happy endings are by nature less worthy of literary respect that I wanted to question.

One viewpoint I’ve heard sometimes is that happy endings are less ‘realistic’ than sad ones. Which honestly strikes me as doubly odd– because no ending is especially realistic, really. One of the first things you notice about life is that– except for, you know, death– it doesn’t actually contain endings at all, whether happy or sad. No one gets convenient freeze-frame and fade-to-black at an especially profound high point or a low point. The words ‘The End’ don’t magically appear in swirly fonts in the air above our heads. Even the major milestones of being done with one phase– graduation, marriage, birth– really only mean that a new phase has begun. If we’re talking realistic– if books were real life– the couple that falls into each others arms at the end of a romance could be headed for divorce within the year. The tragic hero who ends his story in a cloud of existential sorrow could wake up the next morning, win the lottery . . . meet his soulmate . . . joint the Peace Corps and decide to change the world . . . [Read more…]

Where Do You Go From Here?

October 30, 2013 By Anna Elliott

Flowersign — “Signs of Spring” by Mark Jenkins, a sculpture in Washington, DC

I’ve read a lot of posts on rejection, lately, both here on WU and elsewhere. Understandably– it’s a common topic, because if you want to get into the writing business, the odds are about 99% certain that you WILL face the snake-bite sting of rejection at some point. And probably more than once– because the truth is that these days (unless you’re outrageously, spectacularly successful, and sometimes not even then) even if you land a publishing contract once, you will still likely have to go through another round of submissions on your second project. And third, and fourth. And every time, the spectre of possible rejection hovers near.

A couple of months ago, I read a post by a lovely, wise, talented author whose book was in the process of being rejected all over town, and it took me back to the days before I landed my first contract, when I was in exactly her shoes. It made me ask myself what advice I would give to my then-self from my perspective now. I started out trying to frame a comment on her post, but soon found that the comment was evolving into post-length– so here it is. My thoughts on rejection, having faced it WAY more times than I can possibly count over the course of my so-far 10 years writing career– and knowing absolutely that I will face it again.

First of all, the title of this post– I honestly think it’s the single most important question you can ask yourself in the face of rejection. Maybe even the most important question of your writing career. Rejection sucks. It really, really does. It’s painful and hurtful and embarrassing– whether you’re getting a rejection from an agent, a publisher, or just negative feedback from a critique partner or writing group. And I think our tendency as writers (at least my personal tendency) is to want to dig deep into that– think about it, analyze it, describe how it feels, both to ourselves and others. We’re writers; we process things by putting them into words. So I get it if rejection makes you feel like hiding under the blankets–or on writing message boards– and constructing brilliant, poetic similes to describe how you felt on opening the e-mail from the agent/publisher/critique partner. Really I do. I’d even say go for it if it makes you feel better. But I think the most important first step you can take when facing a rejection is to ask not, How do I feel now? (Or the congruent question: What the blankety-blank-blank is wrong with this agent/publisher/critique partner?) The important question is: Where do I go from here? [Read more…]

Helping Hands: Writing With Children

September 5, 2013 By Anna Elliott

There are days when I joke with my husband that I’m going to dedicate my next novel: To my children, without whom this book would have been finished sooner. Oh, it is tempting sometimes. My kiddos are my joy, my light, my universe– all those good things. One of the first things you learn as a parent is that all those squishy greeting-card sentiments? When it comes to your children, they are really true. But conducive to long stretches of uninterrupted writing time, small children are definitely not. I do have help– three mornings a week, our lovely babysitter comes and takes my girls to the park for a couple of hours so that I can sit in an amazingly quiet house and wedge a longer stretch of writing into our usually busy homeschooling schedule. But at the moment, she has the audacity to be off on her honeymoon (Kidding! I truly wish her a lovely time!) which leaves me without that luxury for three weeks.

(Right now as I type this, my girls are downstairs. Being suspiciously quiet. Which means that it will probably take me twice as long to clean up whatever mess they’re making as it will to write this post).

But anyway, I thought that this would be an excellent opportunity to remind myself that there are ways– really there are– that having small children has actually been an incredible benefit to my writing career.

You get to experience the world through a child’s eyes. I read somewhere or other that novelists should strive to bring the boundless wonder, curiosity, and amazement of a young child’s perspective to their writing. Look at that huge tree! Wow– look, a brown dog! Mama, you HAVE to see the enormous bug in the back yard. Children offer a daily reminder of the wonder and miracles to be found even in the minutia of daily life– and that awareness inevitably seeps into my writing.

You’re constantly reminded of the simple magic and power of stories. As a writer, I tend to automatically think in analytic terms of all the stories I encounter– those I write, those I read, even those I watch on a movie screen. And I think it’s important to do so– but at the same time, it’s easy to get a little bogged down by that sometimes: thinking in terms of micro and macro tension, character arcs, plot pinch points, etc. etc. My girls and I also read together for hours a day, though– and at 6 and 4, neither of them is consciously thinking about any of that. They simply love and respond to good stories, love getting lost in a make-believe world. It’s a breath-of-fresh-air reminder of the overarching purpose of all those craft techniques in my writing toolbox.

You have a constant, built-in reality-check when creating fictional child characters in your own books. [Read more…]

Little White (and not-so-white) Lies

July 4, 2013 By Anna Elliott

My children and I are studying Picasso at the moment, and I learned that he famously said, “Art is a lie that tells the truth.” (Everyone else in the world may well have known this already, but I’d never heard that quotation before). He wasn’t talking about novels, specifically, but nonetheless, it struck me as one of the most apt descriptions of a well-crafted novel that I’ve ever heard; the essence of what I’m trying to accomplish with every book I write. But actually, those aren’t the kind of writerly lies I wanted to talk about today, at least not directly. I’m talking about the writerly lies, white and otherwise, that we tell ourselves while we’re in the throes of the writing process.

Here’s mine, my biggest one, the lie I tell myself every single time I start a new book: Maybe this time I’ll get it right on the first try. I never do, of course. For me– and for most if not all of the other authors I know– getting the first draft of a novel perfectly sparkling and correct is impossible. Every chapter– every paragraph and sentence, even– that I write teaches me something new about my characters and the journey they’re on. Which means that no matter how much I plan and outline in advance (and I do quite a bit, and not that it’s not helpful) I don’t fully understand my characters or their journey until I’ve written them through it– sometimes all the way through it, right up to the very end.

And that means that the opening chapters of my book get written and re-written and written again as I understand more fully what the book is all about. It’s inevitable. Even the books that have come to me the most easily and the most quickly, I’ve re-written the opening chapters at least . . . I don’t know . . . I’d say a minimum of 3 times.

But I don’t let myself think about that when I’m actually writing those opening pages of my very first draft. If I did, if I let myself dwell on the fact that in all likelihood 90% of what I was writing was doomed to end up on the cutting room floor . . . I won’t say I’d never start another book again, but it would definitely be harder to sit down and take that giant first leap of putting the first words on the page. So instead I let myself believe the little white writerly lie, Maybe this time will be easier– maybe this time I’ll get it right on the first try. [Read more…]

What to Do When You Need a Creative Recharge

May 17, 2013 By Anna Elliott

Image by Brocken Inaglory licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

In the last couple of months, I released one book and wrote another in six weeks, start to finish. (No, I don’t usually write that fast; yes, I really, really wish I had the magic recipe to make novels come that quickly and easily all the time– if I ever figure that recipe out, I’ll post it here!) I have more to do– there’s always more to do. Edits on another mostly-completed book, a sequel to the just-finished novel . . . But this week, I’m not working on any of it. This is the part of the process where I know I need to take some time to regroup and recharge, because I’m just . . . empty. If you imagine a story-well inside where the creativity bubbles up, then mine is at the moment dry.

And not that that’s a bad thing. There was a time– a LONG period of time–when being creatively empty would have felt like a bad thing to be– scary and unpleasant and wrong. Earlier in my writing career, I would have fretted and fumed at not being able to write, or worried that that inner story-well would never be refilled. To be honest, I still feel a bit restless when I have to take a break from writing– I love getting my daily word count; I’m happiest when I’m on fire with a story that is begging to be told. But this time around, it occurred to me that I was feeling much more at peace than usual with the idea of needing to take time to recharge. Somewhere along the way, I’ve learned to trust the process, to trust that the well of creativity will once again be filled- because it always is. To trust that my fingers will soon start to itch with the urge to write another story–because they always do. This time around, I’m letting myself relax into all the ways I’ve found over the years to help with a creative recharge.

Here are my chosen strategies: [Read more…]

Take 5: Kitty Bennet’s Diary

April 19, 2013 By Anna Elliott

This past month, Kitty Bennet’s Diary, the third book in my Pride and Prejudice Chronicles, released. Thanks so much to everyone here at WU for letting me share a bit about the book here!

Q: What’s the premise of your novel? Kitty Bennet’s Diary is the third of my diary-format imagined sequels to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The story focuses on Kitty Bennet, younger sister to Elizabeth Bennet. To quote the back cover copy:

Kitty Bennet is finished with love and romance. She lost her one-time fiance in the Battle of Waterloo, and in the battle’s aftermath saw more ugliness and suffering than she could bear. Staying with her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner in London for the winter, Kitty throws her energies into finding a husband for her hopelessly bookish sister Mary, and discovering whatever mysterious trouble is worrying her sister Jane. But then she meets Mr. Lancelot Dalton, a handsome clergyman with a shadowed past–and discovers that though she may be finished with love, love may not be at all finished with her.

Q: What would you like people to know about the story itself? A little-known bit of Jane Austen lore is that according to accounts by Austen’s brother, she actually shared with her family a bit about what she imagined for the cast of characters in Pride and Prejudice after the official close of the novel. The basis for Kitty Bennet’s Diary was in fact the details Jane Austen shared with her family about Kitty and Mary Bennet’s eventual fates. It tremendously fun– and a tremendous privilege, too– to get to write both Kitty and Mary towards the endings that Jane Austen herself imagined for them. I hope Austen would approve of the road I had them travel to get there!

[Read more…]

The Voice

March 15, 2013 By Anna Elliott

This month, I’ve been dipping my toes into the water of a brand-new project, taking the first steps on the looooong road that will eventually (I hope!) lead to a finished novel. I actually love this part of the process. Doing loads and loads of research reading, letting myself daydream as I read (or do dishes, or watch my six year old practice handwriting), racing to my computer to type notes into my ‘ideas’ folder as they occur to me. It’s a little like decorating a Christmas tree at this stage of the game. Every day I unwrap a few shiny ornaments–a setting, a plot twist idea, a deeper understanding of the hero’s emotional baggage and journey– and tentatively decide where they might hang. I don’t have a vision of the whole tree, not yet–I may not until the moment when all those shiny ornaments are unwrapped and hung and I type ‘the end’ at the close of my first draft. But it will come.

One of those shiny ornaments that I haven’t quite gotten unwrapped (I swear I will give up on this metaphor before you’re all thoroughly sick of it!) yet is the narrator’s voice. That will come, too, I know–it always does, when the time is right. There are many guidelines–many very good– out there with tips on how to strengthen your narrative ‘voice’, but to be honest, I don’t typically use any of them when I’m writing or outlining. For me, there’s an element of almost magic in uncovering a character’s unique voice and style of narration. At some point in my reading and research, the main character’s voice simply starts sounding loud and clear in my head. A lightening bolt strikes, and that’s the moment when I know I’m ready to start typing.

Which is great, but not especially predictable or helpful in terms of giving other authors advice on how to find their own voice. I really enjoyed Lisa Cron’s post here last summer on the subject of ‘unmasking the muse’. Essentially, Lisa suggested that the creative force that drives our writing isn’t some external ‘muse’ beyond our control, that even when it seems a question of magical lightening bolts striking and bringing characters to life, it’s really our amazing subconscious minds at work. So this time around, I thought I’d try to pay attention and delve into the process a little bit more. Where exactly do these voices come from, these characters’ voices that we hear so loud and clear when we’re telling a story? How do we make them striking and unique and ensure that they come alive on the page? [Read more…]

A Broken Piece

February 15, 2013 By Anna Elliott

I wish this were one of my books, and I could somehow re-write the ending to this story, make it a happy one. But it isn’t, and I can’t. Two months ago, I shared the news here on WU that we were expecting our third baby. Very sadly, this past month, the baby died during the second trimester.

At hard times in my life, I’ve always turned to prayer, and faith. But you know, I’ve always relied on stories—on books and imaginary characters and other authors’ words—too, even if it’s in a different way.

I remember when I was twelve, and in the throws of my first terribly serious summer camp crush. His name was … Jim? Yes, I’m probably more than 90% certain it was Jim; I’m equally fairly certain that he barely registered my existence. But anyway, when summer ended and the autumn leaves were turning colors and it was safe to assume I wouldn’t see Jim again (see fact of his barely registering my existence, above) I solemnly assured myself that, “’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Which now strikes me as side-splittingly funny with a dash of toe-curlingly embarrassing mixed in. And heaven help me, you’d know from that story alone that I was basically doomed to grow up a writer. But at the time, it actually was a comfort to my sparkly pink 12-year-old heart.

On a more serious note, after the birth of my first daughter, I read a passage in Diana Gabaldon’s Dragonfly in Amber that so, so perfectly captured the crazy, joyful, teary, terrifying mix of the postpartum emotions that I remember sitting with my newborn girl in my arms and rereading it again and again and again until I knew it by heart. It felt like a love letter written directly to me—as though this author whom I’d never met and probably never would had somehow still managed to reach out her hand and tell me, You are not alone.

All this month, I’ve thought of a beautiful line from Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer about those we love and lose and grieve for: “You learn to love the space they leave behind.”

We named the baby Wren, for the tiny bird that rose above even the eagle and soared the highest in the legend about the contest of all the birds. I believe that one way or another, I will see her again. But I believe something else, too: I believe that somehow, some way, all this pain and grief and hope inside me now will work its way into my writing, into the stories I tell.

Not that I’m planning to write a book about miscarriage or a mother who loses a child, nothing that directly parallel. And not that I necessarily believe this was the “reason” or “purpose” behind my losing the baby, either; nothing so trimmed-off and tidy. I just know that sometime in the future, in the midst of some book I’m writing, I’ll find myself typing words that would never have come to me without my heart having been cracked open the way it is now. And those words will be my love letter—as I hope in a small way this post is, too—my way of stretching out a hand to anyone grieving, whether for a child, a mother, a father, a friend, and saying, You are not alone.

I said at the beginning of this post that the story didn’t have a happy ending. But I can hope and believe that in a way, it can and will. Another of my favorite quotations is from Ellis Peters’ The Potter’s Field. What we see in this world at the hardest moments in our lives, Peters writes, “is only a broken piece from a perfect whole.”

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