Five Questions with our new Instructor, Cara Wall

Meet our new instructor, Cara Wall.

What’s your favorite book and why?

I like long, character driven novels I can sink into, like The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert and Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett.

What do you love about writing?

I love words, I love living inside the emotional lives of my characters, I love the hard, painstaking work of living half in and half out of my own life in order to be the scribe for a story.

What do you hate about writing?

I find it really hard to move from my daily life into the creative realm. The transition always feels deeply unsettling, and I resist it more often than not—even though I know writing is my life’s work and one of the most satisfying things I will ever do.

Talk about your writing process? Are you structured? Organic?

My writing process requires a lot of baked goods. I need comfort cakes or cookies to convince me to retreat from daily life to writing.Technically, I do years of freewriting, longhand, in spiral notebooks. I don’t think or write linearly—I jump around from character to character and scene to scene. Once I feel like I know every character’s full arc, I begin the nearly impossible (for me) process of weaving everything into an order other people might understand.

What are you working on now?

I am pretty far in to my second book. It’s about a painting that is left on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the people who want to discover its history. I am
Hoping it will be out in late 2024 or 2025.

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