Jasmine's Place Issue No. 14 - December 2014 | Page 35

Rhonda McKnight is the author of the Black
Expressions Top 20 bestsellers, A Woman’s
Revenge (Mar 2013), What Kind of Fool
(Feb 2012), An Inconvenient Friend (Aug
2010) and Secrets and Lies (Dec 2009).
Other titles include the Second Chances
series, Unbreak My Heart (July 2014),
Breaking All The Rules (Oct 2013) and Give
a Little Love (Dec 2013). She was a 2010
nominee for the African-American Literary
Award in the categories of Best Christian
Fiction Novel and Best Anthology.
She was the winner of the 2010 Emma Award for Favorite Debut Author and the
2009 Shades of Romance Award for Best Christian Fiction Novel. Originally from a
small, coastal town in New Jersey, she’s called Atlanta, Georgia home for sixteen
years. Here, she shares about the crafts of writing.
How do you form your plots?
My ideas come from various places,
but I form my plots by thinking
through the events I want to happen
in the story and then expanding on
those by creating conflict for the
characters.
Do you envisage characters before
plots or the other way round?
I’m not sure I can say one or the
other definitively, but I do think I
meet the character first and it’s
easier for me to shape my
characters. The plot work I do is very
intensive, but I never really begin
writing before I’ve figured out where
my characters are going in the story.
You've released 7 novels in a short
time, and you are planning to
release another novel in January
2015. How did you break in to
writing and get published? How do
you keep the momentum?
’ve been writing since I was a child,
but started writing seriously for
publication in 2004. I studied the
craft by reading books, attending
conferences and working closely with
a critique group. In early 2007, I
submitted a proposal to Kensington
Publisher’s Urban Christian Imprint
and the novel was acquired.
It was released in December 2009. I
often feel like I haven’t written
enough, but I guess I forget I work
full-time and I’m a single parent, so I
try to give myself some grace for not
having more books on the shelves. As
for momentum, I know my writing is
a gift, so I try very hard to remember
that God wants the fruit of that.
JASMINE'S PLACE
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