Laura Whitcomb

Laura Whitcomb grew up in Pasadena, California in a mildly haunted house. She received her English degree at California State University at Northridge in 1993. She has taught Language Arts in California and Hawaii. She has won three Kay Snow Awards and was once runner up in the Bulwer-Lytton writing contest for the best first sentence of the worst Science Fiction novel never written. In her spare time she sings madrigals with the Sherwood Renaissance Singers and is the props mistress for the Portland Christmas Revels. She lives in Wilsonville, Oregon.

The movie rights for A Certain Slant of Light sold to Filmcolony. ACSOL will be published in Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and German. The audio book is published by Listening Library. In 2005 ACSOL was also chosen for the "Discover Great New Writers" program at Barnes & Noble bookstores.

The Fetch was #5 in the top ten of Children's Indie Next List 2009 and was published as an audio book by Recorded Books.

Laura Whitcomb Q&A - Writer's Digest interview - Feb 23, 2009

The following is an excerpt from the article.

Your new book, Novel Shortcuts, is filled with tips on how to write a fast but strong first draft. What would you say the key is to accomplishing this?
The exercise that was the most helpful to me while writing my second novel is the one I call “Shortcut to the Scene” in which I prepare the left brain stuff (action, dialogue) and the right brain stuff (poetry, emotion, metaphor, simile) into a one page model from which to work. When I started using this method I found I was not only writing better first drafts of scenes, but I was doing it about three times faster.

This is your second writing reference book-what do you enjoy most about writing this type of book?
I enjoy those passages where I feel so comfortable that it seems like the reader and I are chatting in our own little writers support group. And I love finding the perfect examples to demonstrate my techniques. With this book I also loved thinking up the “fun stuff” at the end of each chapter where I suggest out-of-the-box activities that tie into the topics.

... Read the complete interview on the Writer's Digest web site.