Q&A With Gabrielle St. George 

Today I have the honor of doing a Q&A with author Gabrielle St. George who is the author of the novels “How To Murder A Marriage”, and “How To Kill A Kingpin”. Those titles sound catchy I think. 

Q: So Gabrielle at what point in your life did you realize you were called to be a writer?

A: When I wrote an illustrated book about personified blobs in Grade 2 and my sweet teacher told me she loved it. It felt so good, I heard my calling. I couldn’t not write. It comes, as naturally to me as breathing, although it feels more like an itch I need to scratch. What I most love to do is create. I write, I paint, I dance, I garden, I cook, I design and build houses. The mandate I give myself for my creations is to make people feel good, to make them feel better. If I accomplish that then my work is successful.

Q: Where do you get your ideas to write your books?

A: My kids say my MC Gina is me, I’d prefer to describe her as a version of me, but they might be right. Much of the story in my novel How To Murder A Marriage is quite autobiographical. Of course, some experiences are amalgamated, and exaggerated, and many others are toned down because the truth is definitely stranger than fiction and often harder to swallow. I draw upon many of my real-life experiences and relationships for inspiration, fodder, and straight up material in my writing. Everyone knows to be careful about what they say around me but nobody is!

Writing this novel was a form of therapy for me. Time is of course, a great healer, even when we don’t believe it possible and now, I truly can laugh at many of the stressful and traumatic events that troubled me for years. Laughter is my medicine and finding the humor in my past pain helped me write this book and writing this book helped me heal the pain. 

Q: What’s your advice to anyone who feels the call to write? What’s your advice to those dealing with writers block?

A: If you don’t have anything honest to say, don’t say anything at all. Be Brave, tell the truth. It’s the most difficult and uncomfortable thing to do especially if you’re drawing on your own life experiences and we’re always doing that to some degree. We all lie to ourselves regularly and that is a bad habit we must break in our writing and ideally in our everyday lives. The old cliché the truth hurts didn’t come from nowhere. Feel the pain, feel the fear and do it anyway. That’s what courage is. I don’t allow myself the luxury of writer’s block. I ascribe to James Thurber’s philosophy, “Don’t get it right, get it written”, and then I rewrite to get it right. Just type the damn thing.

Q: Does Hollywood have the rights to any of your novels?

A: I’m currently negotiating a deal for a TV series, or 3 TV movies based on the books. I’ll keep you posted!

Q: Are you writing a new novel now? If so what’s it about?

A: I just started writing the first draft of book #3 in The Ex-Whisperer Files series, HOW TO BURY A BILLIONAIRE. It’s sort of an homage to Anna Nicole Smith, and age differences, and gold diggers, and dirty old misogynistic men, and nasty rich people with way too much money. That’s about all I know so far. At this point in the series the characters dictate the story to me—I’m just the typist.