Sarah's writing journal

The heroine of my next novel, Tell Me Everything finds books by the French author, Colette, in the library just when she needs them most. Colette is one of those wonderful writers who can be a shivery role model - you admire, but aren't quite sure you'd have the courage to follow! However, it was a real pleasure in the writing process to go back to the novels and get lost in that summer hazy atmosphere the stories evoke for me. And even more of a pleasure to read Judith Thurman's brilliant biography of Colette's amazing life, Secrets of the Flesh - A Life of Colette.. It's one of those books where you spend as much time making notes as reading, because each page contains a gem. Sorting out my desk this morning, I came across pages and page of scribbles I'd made and each one is worthy of its own writing prompt...

'For I felt, each day better ... that I was, precisely, born NOT to write.'
'General ideas were like dangling earrings; they didn't suit her.'
'For a child, the unwillingness to thrive can also be a form of revenge.'
'There are people who fling themselves into the path of your existence, and plunge it into chaos.'
'He even had trouble controlling the pages of his evening newspaper.'
'So many women want to be corrupted, and so few are chosen!'
'Jealousy is the only suffering we endure without ever becoming used to it.'
'The widespread adoration of women was also an implacable way of subjugating them.'
'swindled of what I had been secretly plotting to relinquish.'
'no one who has tried both to mother and to write can honestly say they are not, at times, conflicting vocations.'
'that graceful, complimentary manner of unfaithful husbands.'
'A woman reaches an age when the only thing left to her is to enrich her own self.'