Nita Collins writes literary and upmarket speculative fiction that explores the connections and disconnections between people, with the natural world, and within the systems we’ve built, and what those relationships reveal about how we live and how we might live differently.
She is drawn to stories where the ethics of living are central, and where systemic collapse is seen through the intimate lens of personal and family life. She strives to do the same, because she believes fiction is one of the few places we can practice being different.
Her work is influenced by writers such as Emily St. John Mandel, Lily Brooks-Dalton, and Becky Chambers.
She lives in the Boreal forest of Canada’s Yukon Territory, where the relationship between people and the wild is immediate and unignorable—and where disconnection is hardest to pretend away.
She is currently querying The Face of Amore, a work of literary science fiction.
More than Words is my personal blog over on Substack - a collection of letters addressed to a person who I have named Vi.
As in rhymes with pie...but you should silently substitute your own name, because you're the one I'm really writing to.
I'm doing my best to follow the poet Mary Oliver's most excellent instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it.
How a Winter Walk Solved A Writing Problem
Dear Vi, One of the story ideas I’ve got simmering on my brain’s back burner is set in a fictional town beside the Stewart River in Canada’s Yukon Territory. So far I only have the setting, but it’s important to me that the setting should almost be like character in the novel, not just a…
How to Show Tension in an Everyday Scene
This article explains a simple way to create scene tension in fiction. A strong scene shows a character with a goal, an obstacle in the way, and a decision about what to do next.
Knit One, Revise Two: What Knitting Taught Me About Revising My Novel
Dear Vi, I was staring at the draft of my novel the other day, contemplating a scene I loved but that didn’t quite fit the storyline. As I debated whether to fix it or ignore it, a post from my knitting friend Dee popped up in my feed. “I screwed the pattern up,” she’d written…
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