An Interview With Author Sarah Anne Carter
This week, we had the enormous pleasure of interviewing Sarah Anne Carter, author of The Ring, Life After, and Orphan Wish Island.
Sarah participated in our interview series, which we devised to give our readers greater insight into the experiences of other authors. Being a writer can often feel very isolating and it’s all too easy to start believing that you’re heading nowhere, while other writers sail their way into a publishing deal.
The truth is rarely so simple.
As providers of manuscript assessments, we’ve seen writers of all kinds; although we do meet writers who make it from A to B with minimal complications, this is a once in a blue moon occurrence. Most writers we speak to and provide manuscript assessments for face a long and arduous journey towards success. Even some of the best-known writers in the English language had a long road. To name a few…
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone took six years to finish.
George R. Martin takes approximately five years to complete each book in his A Song of Fire and Ice series.
Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell was ten years in the making.
J. R. R. Tolkein was a notoriously slow writer and took between twelve and seventeen years to finish The Lord of The Rings.
On the other side of the spectrum, we have books like A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle, both of which took just three weeks to write.
Every writer is different and every journey is unique. Understanding these differences can help you avoid feelings of discouragement and failure.
Here’s Sarah’s experience.
Can you tell our readers a little about you as an individual?
“I grew up in a military family and we lived all over the world while I was growing up. When I was 18, I had spent half of my life living overseas in Okinawa, Japan and Germany. A couple of years after college, I married a man in the military and we then moved to several places I had never been before, including Alaska. After all that, I’m glad to finally be settled in Ohio.”
What inspired you to become a writer?
“In 4th grade, my teacher encouraged me to type out some of my stories after reading them in our daily journal. She helped me illustrate one as a homemade book and then submitted a poem of mine to a military children anthology. It was published and I have been writing ever since.”
Can you tell us about your current work in progress?
“I just started a novel that will explore how to break a generational cycle of making bad relationship decisions. I have just started exploring the characters, so it’s in the very early stages.”
How long did it take you to complete your first manuscript, from first conception of the idea to final draft?
“My first book, The Ring, was a decade in the making. I started the book in 2010 after mulling over the idea for a year or two and then lost the file in a computer crash. Then, we moved and I started my master’s degree and our fourth child came along. I started working on it again in 2018 and it was published in 2019.”
What have you found to be the most challenging aspect of writing and/or publishing?
“The most challenging part for me is making sure I set aside the time to do the writing. As a mother of four, there’s a lot of other things that tend to fill my days.”
Are there any writing tips you'd like to share with other writers?
“My best writing tip is to try and write most days. Taking long breaks can make you forget where you are in a story and then you have to spend time reviewing what you wrote. I’ve also found it helpful to take notes while I write about what’s happening, the timeline and some details about the characters.”
What have you found most challenging about your writing journey?
“Right now, it’s challenging to find readers since there are so many books out there. With self-publishing, the book market is saturated. It’s great that so many people can share the ideas and voices; however, with so many, it gets harder to stand out.”
What have you found most helpful about your writing journey?
“My family members read my draft and they find a lot of my typos and where the story doesn’t quite fit. For my published works, it was very helpful to hire an outside editor to give it a look over after I had revised it a few times.”
Are there any books on the writing craft that you’d recommend?
“I would recommend On Writing by Stephen King and The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing by Writer’s Digest.”
Please share just a few lines (2 or 3) from your current work in progress.
“From the novel I’m just starting: She felt frozen in place as he walked toward the railing and looked down at the river. Then, he gestured for her to come stand by him. Her mother’s voice rang in her head, ‘Do not ever stop and talk to a strange man.’ His eyes caught hers and her mother’s warning flew out into the night as she stepped toward him.”
And a few quirky questions!
If you could sit down with any author, dead or alive, who would it be and why? What would you most like to discuss with them?
“This is a very hard question. There are so many I would like to meet. I think I would choose Richard Paul Evans to talk about how he creates characters and stories and then how he edits his books.”
What book character do you most identify with and why?
“I can relate to Hermione from Harry Potter. I was once a very habitual rule-follower and perfectionist and had to learn to put relationships above rules.”
If you could live in any fictional universe, where would you live and why?
“I would live in Narnia. As an animal lover, it would be so neat to be able to talk to the animals while living among them.”
Thank you so much for answering our questions, Sarah!
If you’d like to find out more about Sarah’s books or follow her on social media, here are the relevant links:
Author website: www.sarahannecarter.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BySarahAnneCarter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bysarahannecarter/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bysarahacarter
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19447698.Sarah_Anne_Carter
Alternatively, you can visit her Linktree: https://linktr.ee/SarahAnneCarter
Get in Touch
If you’re an author or aspiring writer and would like to be featured in our interview series, please get in touch. We’d also love to hear from you if you’re interested in our manuscript assessment services, which can help you significantly reduce the amount of time spent redrafting your novel and increase your chances of publication.