Linda K Sienkiewicz

Writing life, line by line

When Kacey Musgraves accidentally wrote the theme song for my novel’s heroine

By

Serenity's Anthem: Kacey Musgraves' "Dry Spell" Writers believe we make deliberate choices about our characters, but then a song comes on the radio and we suddenly recognize something we'd written without fully understanding it. The other day I heard Kacey Musgraves' "Dry Spell" and nearly drove off the road. Serenity, the heroine of Love and Other Incurable Ailments, could have penned every … [Read more...]

Instagram thinks I’m a mystic. I’m really a Sneaker Diva.

By

Fashion in a Box: Instagram must think I need help. Not help-help, but fashion help. Dozens of styling apps fill my feed with promises to transform me into my best-dressed self or to reveal my feminine archetype. No one ever asks if I'd rather be Woman Who Owns Seven Pairs of Sneakers. No one ever asks if I'm Woman Mourning the End of JoAnn Fabric. Identify your archetype and buy more … [Read more...]

My 5 Questionable Superpowers and How They Mirror my Fictional Heroine

By

None of them involve a cape! I may not have the power to fly or read minds, but I’ve developed a few, strange, human superpowers over the years that can also be seen as oddly comforting when you reframe them as a positive. After I wrote Love and Other Incurable Ailments, I slowly realized I hadn't invented the quirks of the main character Serenity. I gave her a few of my own. Maybe being … [Read more...]

Flattened, Twisted, and Still Alive: The English Language

By

The Beauty of a Battered Language: Finley Peter Dunne (1867 – 1936) once quipped, “When we Americans are done with the English language it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.” Nearly a century later, we’re still joyriding over words, backing up, running them down, and taking them for new spins. That's the charm of language. It evolves, adapts, reinvents itself with … [Read more...]

To Name or Not to Name: Writing Fiction in a Real Place

By

When Fiction Meets a Real Place Anne Tyler amazes me with how she writes about real places, Baltimore, especially, and yet somehow makes them entirely her own. Her fictional neighborhoods feel familiar, but her corner stores and diners have names you’ve never heard before. You feel as if she’s built a parallel Baltimore just a few streets over from the real one. In my first novel, set near … [Read more...]