Meghan Holloway found her first Nancy Drew mystery in a sun-dappled attic at the age of eight and subsequently fell in love with the grip and tautness of a well-told mystery. She flew an airplane before she learned how to drive a car, did her undergrad work in Creative Writing in the sweltering south, and finished a Masters of Library and Information Science in the blustery north. She spent a summer and fall in Maine picking peaches and apples, traveled the world for a few years, and did a stint fighting crime in the records section of a police department.She now lives in the foothills of the Appalachians with her standard poodle and spends her days as a scientist with the requisite glasses but minus the lab coat.
Holloway's new novel is Once More Unto the Breach.
From the author's Q&A with Rich Ehisen:
Open Mic: Let’s talk about language. Your narrative flows so beautifully, but still feels economical, with no wasted words. Writers sometimes fall in love with the beauty of sentences over their value to the story. Do you ever struggle with that? And if so, how do you overcome it?Visit Meghan Holloway's website, and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Istagram.
Holloway: I love lyricism in writing both as a writer and as a reader. I strive for vividness and for a very sensory reading experience when I’m writing, but it is a challenge to not get caught up in the writing itself. I have to also remember that I am a storyteller. I try to keep the idea in the back of my head that regardless of how lovely a sentence flows, how beautiful it is on the page, it still needs to move the plot forward. If it doesn’t, I need to be ruthless in cutting it despite how pretty it is. That’s not easy and it takes a lot of practice, but one thing that helps is that once I finish a draft I usually print it out on paper and go through it and read it aloud. That helps me figure out how well the story flows, and also where I need to cut out the loveliness and...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: Once More Unto the Breach.
The Page 69 Test: Once More Unto the Breach.
Writers Read: Meghan Holloway.
--Marshal Zeringue