How do you feel about romance in your books?
Different genres of course tend to have differing amounts of romance. How much do you prefer to have in the books you read? Do you like it to be a central part of the story? Is a little love accompanying the main theme acceptable? Or is even an inkling of infatuation unwelcome?
When it comes to genre fiction, I like my romance. It does not have to be the focus of the story, but I definitely prefer it to be one of the major components. There can be perfectly good sci-fi and fantasy stories without a little love, but I do admit to being a bit disappointed if there isn't some romance in there somewhere. As a parallel to the main plot, it helps spice the story up for me.
How about you?
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Saturday, October 25, 2014
How do YOU Write? Part 4
This 2012 interview with Barbara Kingsolver from The Daily Beast touches on a few topics already mentioned in previous posts - when she writes, does she outline, etc. As a mother to young children myself, one of my favorite parts is how she used to say the school bus was her muse! For me, that is definitely the biggest obstacle to actually sitting down to write these days - finding time when the children aren't vying for my attention. Usually this means writing after they are in bed (although let it be said, bedtime rarely goes smoothly!), or else convincing my husband to take them to do something fun out of the house.
Describe your morning routine.
I tend to wake up very early. Too early. Four o’clock is standard. My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it’s because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head. So getting to my desk every day feels like a long emergency. It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
When would you normally finish your day, then? What would your evening be like?
For the whole of my career as a novelist, I have also been a mother. I was offered my first book contract, for The Bean Trees, the day I came home from the hospital with my first child. So I became a novelist and mother on the same day. Those two important lives have always been one for me. I’ve always had to do both at the same time. So my writing hours were always constrained by the logistics of having my children in someone else’s care. When they were little, that was difficult. I cherished every hour at my desk as a kind of prize. As time has gone by and my children entered school it became progressively easier to be a working mother. My oldest is an adult, and my youngest is 16, so both are now self-sufficient—but that’s been a gradual process. For me, writing time has always been precious, something I wait for and am eager for and make the best use of. That’s probably why I get up so early and have writing time in the quiet dawn hours, when no one needs me.
Following up on that, do you have any unusual traditions associated with the writing process? Any magic hat you have to wear?
No. As you can probably guess from this conversation, I’ve always been so eager to write that I don’t need any rituals to get myself in the right mood. I used to say that the school bus is my muse. When it pulled out of the driveway and left me without anyone to take care of, that was the moment my writing day began, and it ended when the school bus came back. As a working mother, my working time was constrained. On the other hand, I’m immensely grateful to my family for normalizing my life, for making it a requirement that I end my day at some point and go and make dinner. That’s a healthy thing, to set work aside and make dinner and eat it. It’s healthy to have these people in my life who help me to carry on a civilized routine. And also to have these people in my life who connect me to the wider world and the future. My children have taught me everything about life and about the kind of person I want to be in the world. They anchor me to the future in a concrete way. Being a mother has made me a better writer. It’s also true to say that being a writer has made me a better mother.
Describe your routine when conceiving of a book and its plot, before the writing begins. Do you like to map out your books ahead of time, or just let it flow?
I do a lot of mapping out. I was trained as a scientist—undergraduate and graduate degrees in biology—and I tend to think like a scientist and work like a scientist. It seems to me that every book reminds me of writing a dissertation. Each idea begins with a hypothesis, to put it into scientific terms. A great “what if” that seems important to me. Then I think about how to translate that very real question, about human nature or the world, into a plot. A novel doesn’t tell you anything. It has to show you everything. Even a question has to be asked through character and plot. I spend a lot of time thinking about the narrative structure. I do tons of writing that is not yet scenic but more schematic. It will never appear in the book, it’s really just notes to me about this book. In fact the top of the file might say “The Lamp on the Desk.” I made that up because it’s what I’m looking at now, but you see what I mean. The file will be “The Lamp on the Desk,” and then it will say “the characters are x, y, and z. This is the plot. It begins here, it goes there, everyone has to see x in the end.” It’s writing about the book, almost like a treatment or, as they say in the film industry, a “bible.” I can spend months doing this, until I know who everyone is, and what they will be doing. Only then do I start writing. I invent characters who will do what I need them to do. Then I invent life histories that will make them the kind of people that would do what I need them to do. Like all authors, I’m asked if characters are biographical, if I put people I know into my fiction. You can see from my process that that would be impossible for me. I begin by seeing a narrative, so I can’t put people I know in it—they simply wouldn’t behave properly, they wouldn’t be cooperative and do what I asked of them. So I invent the people I need, and that’s a lot more fun anyway. I can continually refine the characters, their histories, and their damage, until they are exactly the right people I need. Then, after a lot of that work is done, I start writing scenes. Sometimes the opening scene will occur to me first, but usually not. I write a lot of material that I know I’ll throw away. It’s just part of the process. I have to write hundreds of pages before I get to page one.
What advice would you give to an aspiring author?
Learn as much as you can about the world itself. That means not just writing courses, other courses. Probably I would say learn about science. There are very few fiction writers who know about biology, physics, environmental chemistry, and there’s a great need for science in the literary world.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/05/barbara-kingsolver-how-i-write.html
Describe your morning routine.
I tend to wake up very early. Too early. Four o’clock is standard. My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it’s because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head. So getting to my desk every day feels like a long emergency. It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
When would you normally finish your day, then? What would your evening be like?
For the whole of my career as a novelist, I have also been a mother. I was offered my first book contract, for The Bean Trees, the day I came home from the hospital with my first child. So I became a novelist and mother on the same day. Those two important lives have always been one for me. I’ve always had to do both at the same time. So my writing hours were always constrained by the logistics of having my children in someone else’s care. When they were little, that was difficult. I cherished every hour at my desk as a kind of prize. As time has gone by and my children entered school it became progressively easier to be a working mother. My oldest is an adult, and my youngest is 16, so both are now self-sufficient—but that’s been a gradual process. For me, writing time has always been precious, something I wait for and am eager for and make the best use of. That’s probably why I get up so early and have writing time in the quiet dawn hours, when no one needs me.
Following up on that, do you have any unusual traditions associated with the writing process? Any magic hat you have to wear?
No. As you can probably guess from this conversation, I’ve always been so eager to write that I don’t need any rituals to get myself in the right mood. I used to say that the school bus is my muse. When it pulled out of the driveway and left me without anyone to take care of, that was the moment my writing day began, and it ended when the school bus came back. As a working mother, my working time was constrained. On the other hand, I’m immensely grateful to my family for normalizing my life, for making it a requirement that I end my day at some point and go and make dinner. That’s a healthy thing, to set work aside and make dinner and eat it. It’s healthy to have these people in my life who help me to carry on a civilized routine. And also to have these people in my life who connect me to the wider world and the future. My children have taught me everything about life and about the kind of person I want to be in the world. They anchor me to the future in a concrete way. Being a mother has made me a better writer. It’s also true to say that being a writer has made me a better mother.
Describe your routine when conceiving of a book and its plot, before the writing begins. Do you like to map out your books ahead of time, or just let it flow?
I do a lot of mapping out. I was trained as a scientist—undergraduate and graduate degrees in biology—and I tend to think like a scientist and work like a scientist. It seems to me that every book reminds me of writing a dissertation. Each idea begins with a hypothesis, to put it into scientific terms. A great “what if” that seems important to me. Then I think about how to translate that very real question, about human nature or the world, into a plot. A novel doesn’t tell you anything. It has to show you everything. Even a question has to be asked through character and plot. I spend a lot of time thinking about the narrative structure. I do tons of writing that is not yet scenic but more schematic. It will never appear in the book, it’s really just notes to me about this book. In fact the top of the file might say “The Lamp on the Desk.” I made that up because it’s what I’m looking at now, but you see what I mean. The file will be “The Lamp on the Desk,” and then it will say “the characters are x, y, and z. This is the plot. It begins here, it goes there, everyone has to see x in the end.” It’s writing about the book, almost like a treatment or, as they say in the film industry, a “bible.” I can spend months doing this, until I know who everyone is, and what they will be doing. Only then do I start writing. I invent characters who will do what I need them to do. Then I invent life histories that will make them the kind of people that would do what I need them to do. Like all authors, I’m asked if characters are biographical, if I put people I know into my fiction. You can see from my process that that would be impossible for me. I begin by seeing a narrative, so I can’t put people I know in it—they simply wouldn’t behave properly, they wouldn’t be cooperative and do what I asked of them. So I invent the people I need, and that’s a lot more fun anyway. I can continually refine the characters, their histories, and their damage, until they are exactly the right people I need. Then, after a lot of that work is done, I start writing scenes. Sometimes the opening scene will occur to me first, but usually not. I write a lot of material that I know I’ll throw away. It’s just part of the process. I have to write hundreds of pages before I get to page one.
What advice would you give to an aspiring author?
Learn as much as you can about the world itself. That means not just writing courses, other courses. Probably I would say learn about science. There are very few fiction writers who know about biology, physics, environmental chemistry, and there’s a great need for science in the literary world.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/05/barbara-kingsolver-how-i-write.html
Monday, October 13, 2014
Good reads
My mentor in the world of self-publishing, M. R. Pritchard, came out with a new book recently. Sparrow Man is a sort of romantic dark fantasy novel that might just take your breath away. I'd have to say it's my favorite of her books thus far, although the YA paranormal romance Saratoga isn't too far off in second place. Of note, they both touch on the topics of the heavens and Hell, and even more compellingly on the nature of humanity that exists somewhere in between. Check them out sometime, if you're of the mind!
Meg Clark has turned out to be everything her father and the people of her little North Country town of Gouvernour, NY, have been saying her whole life: nothin’ but a piece of white trash. In an effort to hide her past and turn herself around, she spent her inheritance from her dead mother on the perfect little house with a white picket fence. Then something terrible happened and Meg got sent to county lockup so her fiancé, Jim, wouldn’t have to. And then everyone started waking up…dead.
Good thing escaping from County wasn’t hard. Jim told her exactly how to get free. Now Meg is running and the walking dead are following. In a last ditch effort to find weapons to protect herself, Meg finds Sparrow instead. A tall, strange man with a quirk, Sparrow has an obsession with feathers and the only goal that’s on his mind is finding an old barn on Route 37 with a snowy owl in its rafters.
Meg’s headed to Kingston, where she and Jim agreed to meet if they ever got separated. But sometimes, crossing the border brings more than just freedom and protection and safety. Sometimes it brings questions that someone like Meg would prefer not to answer. And everyone keeps asking questions, including Sparrow. He thinks she’s hiding something and he’s not impressed by her stories of the sins she’s been committing all her life. While Sparrow’s the one who’s a bit cracked in the head, it never occurs to Meg that she could be the one who’s not remembering something. Like what really happened that day she killed those seven men.
Demi has it all figured out. She is going to be a ballerina just like her mother wants. Since the dance studio is the only place she feels like she fits in, it’s the perfect plan. All she wants is a normal life, one where she and her parents aren’t moving to a new place after another one of her accidents. Demi knows she is far from normal. She can feel it every time she walks near a park, or a tree, or a flower. She has a gift-or a curse; green things call to her. They tug at her soul and she has no idea how to control it. That is, until she meets Dylan, a boy with a similar gift. Dylan shows Demi the path to discovering who she is and what fate holds for each of them.
 |
| Click here to find it on Amazon |
Meg Clark has turned out to be everything her father and the people of her little North Country town of Gouvernour, NY, have been saying her whole life: nothin’ but a piece of white trash. In an effort to hide her past and turn herself around, she spent her inheritance from her dead mother on the perfect little house with a white picket fence. Then something terrible happened and Meg got sent to county lockup so her fiancé, Jim, wouldn’t have to. And then everyone started waking up…dead.
Good thing escaping from County wasn’t hard. Jim told her exactly how to get free. Now Meg is running and the walking dead are following. In a last ditch effort to find weapons to protect herself, Meg finds Sparrow instead. A tall, strange man with a quirk, Sparrow has an obsession with feathers and the only goal that’s on his mind is finding an old barn on Route 37 with a snowy owl in its rafters.
Meg’s headed to Kingston, where she and Jim agreed to meet if they ever got separated. But sometimes, crossing the border brings more than just freedom and protection and safety. Sometimes it brings questions that someone like Meg would prefer not to answer. And everyone keeps asking questions, including Sparrow. He thinks she’s hiding something and he’s not impressed by her stories of the sins she’s been committing all her life. While Sparrow’s the one who’s a bit cracked in the head, it never occurs to Meg that she could be the one who’s not remembering something. Like what really happened that day she killed those seven men.
 |
| Click here to find it on Amazon |
Demi has it all figured out. She is going to be a ballerina just like her mother wants. Since the dance studio is the only place she feels like she fits in, it’s the perfect plan. All she wants is a normal life, one where she and her parents aren’t moving to a new place after another one of her accidents. Demi knows she is far from normal. She can feel it every time she walks near a park, or a tree, or a flower. She has a gift-or a curse; green things call to her. They tug at her soul and she has no idea how to control it. That is, until she meets Dylan, a boy with a similar gift. Dylan shows Demi the path to discovering who she is and what fate holds for each of them.
You can find her website at
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