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My fannish admirer has sent me another spate of giddy queries, and because I don't want to be the dour, buzz-killing Grinch who sours his/her squee, I shall endeavor to answer them.
-No, I don't have any designs on writing an original novel, at least not one for money. I had such aspirations once upon a time, before I learned that writing for your supper was a much deeper grind than writing for fun. When I was younger, I had daydreams of writing my way through life, of striking paydirt with my first effort, which would cause a stir and immediately catapult me into the pantheon of luminaries like Neil Gaiman and Stephen King. I'd be the youngest writer ever to have a number-one bestseller and would spend my life behind the walls of a posh estate, ogling the pool boys and cranking out one masterpiece after another.
Then I grew up and met real, yeoman writers, people who wrote daily and scuffled along from contract to contract and royalty check to royalty check and sometimes went months without an idea. I realized that writing was a job even if it was also a passion, that there were contracts and deadlines and strings attached. Once you put your story out there for public consumption and expected to be paid for it, the rules changed. There were editors who found every flaw and wart on your bouncing baby opus and pointed them out without regard for your pride or your delicate writer's sensibilities. If they thought Scene X or Chapter Y or Story Z sucked, they told you so, and unlike fandom, you couldn't just ignore them or tell them to blow it out their prissy asses. Writing professionally was indeed SRS Business, and those folks weren't interested in the story, but whether it would sell.
That wasn't for me. Once something begins to feel like a job, I lose my passion for it and begin to resent it. Writing has been a comfort and an escape for me through some very difficult times, has allowed me to try on lives that I would otherwise never have known, and I wanted it to remain a private, cherished pleasure.
-The books that influenced me the most were the works of Stephen King. Literary knobs like Harold Bloom might dismiss him as a pop culture hack, but the man can tell a story and put on a skin like nobody's business. I read Thinner when I was seven, and it was a watershed moment, the moment I knew that stories had power.
It and The Stand were the books that made me want to wield that power, too, to tell my stories. Good stories have weight even as they transport you beyond yourself, and his packed a devastating wallop. I spent the first few years of my writing life imitating him, and some of his techniques and stylistic elements remain with me today.
-As for my ideas, they come from anywhere--ambiguous television scenes, dangling plot threads, unanswered questions, music, snippets of conversation, the abandoned house sinking into the wet earth behind a copse of trees, a dream. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't, but you won't know until you work with them, and sometimes, even if they do work, you don't end up where you intended at all.
-No, I don't have any designs on writing an original novel, at least not one for money. I had such aspirations once upon a time, before I learned that writing for your supper was a much deeper grind than writing for fun. When I was younger, I had daydreams of writing my way through life, of striking paydirt with my first effort, which would cause a stir and immediately catapult me into the pantheon of luminaries like Neil Gaiman and Stephen King. I'd be the youngest writer ever to have a number-one bestseller and would spend my life behind the walls of a posh estate, ogling the pool boys and cranking out one masterpiece after another.
Then I grew up and met real, yeoman writers, people who wrote daily and scuffled along from contract to contract and royalty check to royalty check and sometimes went months without an idea. I realized that writing was a job even if it was also a passion, that there were contracts and deadlines and strings attached. Once you put your story out there for public consumption and expected to be paid for it, the rules changed. There were editors who found every flaw and wart on your bouncing baby opus and pointed them out without regard for your pride or your delicate writer's sensibilities. If they thought Scene X or Chapter Y or Story Z sucked, they told you so, and unlike fandom, you couldn't just ignore them or tell them to blow it out their prissy asses. Writing professionally was indeed SRS Business, and those folks weren't interested in the story, but whether it would sell.
That wasn't for me. Once something begins to feel like a job, I lose my passion for it and begin to resent it. Writing has been a comfort and an escape for me through some very difficult times, has allowed me to try on lives that I would otherwise never have known, and I wanted it to remain a private, cherished pleasure.
-The books that influenced me the most were the works of Stephen King. Literary knobs like Harold Bloom might dismiss him as a pop culture hack, but the man can tell a story and put on a skin like nobody's business. I read Thinner when I was seven, and it was a watershed moment, the moment I knew that stories had power.
It and The Stand were the books that made me want to wield that power, too, to tell my stories. Good stories have weight even as they transport you beyond yourself, and his packed a devastating wallop. I spent the first few years of my writing life imitating him, and some of his techniques and stylistic elements remain with me today.
-As for my ideas, they come from anywhere--ambiguous television scenes, dangling plot threads, unanswered questions, music, snippets of conversation, the abandoned house sinking into the wet earth behind a copse of trees, a dream. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't, but you won't know until you work with them, and sometimes, even if they do work, you don't end up where you intended at all.
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