Meg Waite Clayton's Blog

Please find 1st Books now on Substack!

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So excited!!! Publishers Weekly just included Typewriter Beach on its “Hot Books of Summer”!

They say, “Nothing beats Grace Kelly on the Riviera, as seen in Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief. But Clayton's portrait of an aspiring Hitchcock blonde has intrigue to spare… Fans of Hollywood's golden age will fall in love.”

And in a STARRED review: “Irresistible … Readers will be riveted.”

AND YOU can get a free early copy here on Goodreads:

Or bit.ly/TypewriterBeachGR

Ten years ago today, on the 40th anniversary of Sandra Day O’Connor taking her seat as the 1st female Justice of the Supreme Court, I published my first opinion piece. “Flirting with Justice” ran in the Los Angeles times, and was also picked up by the San Jose Mercury News and the Miami Herald. It remains as relevant today as it was then, so read it, please! It’s publication opened doors for me to write for other news sources, too, so I thought I’d offer a little bit here about how I broke into...

Finding a good literary agent – which is generally the first step to getting published with a traditional publisher – can be like finding any good relationship: complicated! But just as every aspiring author is hoping to meet the perfect agent, every reputable literary agent is hoping to discover the next great American author. You don’t need connections (with rare exceptions). You just need to write a really good book and present it well (definitely two different things). But agents are also de...

Writers Links

The Single Best Piece of Advice I’ve Gotten as a Writer

Great Sources for Writers:

Poets & Writers Magazine
The Nebraska Center for Writers

Books on Writing that I’ve Found Particularly Helpful:

The Art of Fiction by John Gardner: perhaps a little overwhelming for new writers, but I go back to the chapter on plotting again and again
The Weekend Novelist by Robert Ray: a goofy title, but it does a nice job of laying out for the beginner a way to write a novel from start to finis...

I am working through plotting issues myself and returned to these notes from a master class I taught on narrative endings a couple years ago. They are just my notes, which may or may not be helpful to anyone who did not attend the lecture. With that caveat, Im bumping them up for others to more easily find them (and to more easily find them myself!):

PADDLING YOUR BATHTUB INTO LONDON:
HOW GREAT STORIES END

Writing a novel is like paddling from Boston to London in a bathtub. Sometimes the damn...

No Social Distancing Required for Fictional Friends

Like many now, Im social distancing. The good news for me is that a writer in these circumstances can collect as many imaginary friends around her as well, as she can imagine. No six feet of separation required.

A First Draftby Sherlock Holmes (Not Mine)

I dont usually love first draft, but I have a new novel due at HarperCollins January 2, 2021. And at the moment, that seems very hopeful.
Handwritten draft of Page 1 of A Scandal in Bohemia...

So much great news to share on my forthcoming novel,  The Last Train to London, to be published by HarperCollins September 10. We just sold Bulgarian rights, which I’m particularly jazzed about, because one of my sis-in-laws is from Bulgaria — so that means her mom can read. I’m nearly as excited about this as I am about the Hebrew version (sold at auction, which means a lot to this raised-Catholic girl in Chicago writing about this particular moment in history) and Dutch (because the real-li...

The two books that made me dream of becoming a writer were Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. So the news I read this morning in a Publishers Weekly email made me squee: a new l’Engle book is coming!

It’s an adult short story collection that came to Grand Central Publishing via L’Engle’s granddaughter, Charlotte Jones Voiklis. Voiklis, who wrote the wonderful Becoming Madeleine, found some unpublished stories in a box in her grandmother’s “Tower” wri...

I’m in Paris, working on a new novel, and just for fun I thought I’d share what writing in Paris looks like. So enter my apartment here, and stay for the view — which I’m looking at as I write this and wait for Mac to be ready for a patisserie outing.

And a bit of good news, Paris related: You can get a copy of The Race for Paris ebook and get change back from your $2 bill on Kindle, Kobo, Nook, or Apple Books.

To quote Audrey Hepburn, “Paris is always a good idea.”

Well, maybe not after the...