'The delicious promise of a riveting tale'

 

 “I can think of no other experience quite like that of being 20 or so pages into a book and realizing that this is the real thing: a book that is going to offer the delicious promise of a riveting story, arresting language and characters that will haunt me for days.” – Anita Shreve

 

Born in Boston in 1946, Shreve wrote those kinds of books herself, including the mega-bestsellers The Pilot’s Wife, Testimony and The Weight of Water, all also made into successful movies.  She began writing fiction in the 1960s while still a high school student and one of her early short stories, Past the Island, Drifting, was named for the prestigious O. Henry Prize while she was still a teen.  

 

Shreve, who died from cancer in 2018, combined her creative writing with teaching and working as a journalist in the U.S. and Africa before writing The Pilot’s Wife in 1999.  That book catapulted Shreve into her successful full-time writing career that resulted in 19 novels with millions of sales worldwide.

                                            

 Shreve wrote all of her books in longhand, and in an interview with The Writer magazine explained why she thought writing in longhand was the best thing any author could do.

 

“The creative impulse, the thing that gets deep inside me, goes from the brain to the fingertips.  When you’re writing by hand, even when you’re not consciously thinking about it, you’re constructing sentences in the best way possible.”