Our Guest Expert is Author Claire Fullerton:
Claire Fullerton is the traditionally published author of four novels and one novella. Her twenty book awards include the Literary Classics Book of the Year, the Independent Authors Network Book of the Year, and the International Book Awards Gold medal for Literary Fiction. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines including Celtic Life International and Deep South Magazine. Claire is a book reviewer for The New York Journal of Books. She is represented by Julie Gwinn of the Seymour Literary Agency and has recently completed her fifth manuscript. She hails from Memphis, Tennessee, and has lived in Western Malibu for twenty years. Visit http://www.clairefullerton.com
Q: Tell me about your journey to your success as a writer:
A: A writer’s life is built incrementally. It begins by producing the work and submitting. I now look back and realize my career began with the discipline of keeping a journal from a very young age, which helped me develop as a writer. I’ve always submitted to magazines, and I’ll now credit Malibu’s Anne Sobel of the Malibu Surfside News for inviting me to write a weekly column for a full year about life in Malibu, titled, In First Person, from 2009 to 2010. The task taught me about the fine art of brevity and the precise use of language. I am a storyteller, in that I write fiction, and yet I love writing first person narratives. My first novel, A Portal in Time was published by a small press in 2013. That press published Dancing to an Irish Reel in 2016. In 2017, I signed with a literary agent, and my novel, Mourning Dove, a family saga, set on the genteel side of 1970’s Memphis, was published by Firefly Southern Fiction the following year. Mourning Dove helped me gain wider readership and went on to receive fifteen book awards. In May of 2020, Firefly Southern Fiction published my novel, Little Tea, whose title refers to one of its characters and which is about the power of female friendships, also set in the Deep South. I am now in the editing phase of my firth manuscript, and all told, I am grateful to do the work I love and am always thrilled to meet my readers!
Q: What advice would you give to young women and girls who’d like to follow in your writer footsteps?
A: The first thing I’d say to encourage a fiction writer is remain open to finding the story you’d like to tell. Commit to the work. An author’s career is all about balancing inspiration and discipline. Most of the work goes into revision. There is an adage that says, “Writing is re-writing,” and I’ve found that to be true. Submit your stories to magazines online, and in print. Build your resume. Confer with other writers, find your writing community, stay engaged. Establish an online presence. If you’d like to be traditionally published, do your homework on writing as a business. Learn how to look for a compatible literary agent and master the query letter. And once again, writers learn much from those who write as a career. It’s important for writers to find their tribe, on the way to finding their readership.
Q: What is your vision for the next five years?
A: I’d love the grace to continue doing what I love, day in and day out. What I’ve learned about writing is there is no “there” to get to. There is only the progress made as you stay the course of the path.
Click here for the full audio interview on Spotify: http://www.tinyurl.com/ClaireFullerton