I saw these questions on Emerald’s blog and decided to snag them. It’s been a while since I did something like this, and I like these types of lists when they’re short. 🙂
What are you working on right now?
A new story, a serial in progress, that doesn’t have a name yet. It’s sort of a sequel to Stevie One, the last thing I wrote, but mostly it’s a sequel to A Sane Woman, which I started writing 23 years ago. I think I’m about halfway through the new story, and it starts here .
How does your writing process work?
I think of a scene, I write it, I read it, I make changes, I have my Kindle read it to me, I make more changes, I do a final proof, I make proofing changes, and then I post it on my website. Then I start the next installment. It’s like building a house brick-by-brick, and making each brick as you go along.
Who are authors that you most admire?
Hmmm. Rex Stout, for setting the model for mystery stories that I follow to this day (and, of course, Mr. Doyle before him). William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, for humor and masterful language and fierce social commentary. Samuel R. Delany, for Dhalgren. Howard Hawks, Jules Furthman, and Leigh Brackett, for crisp, sharp, unsentimental romances, and for the Hawksian woman. J. R. R. Tolkien, for structure and for the example of how to spend your entire writing life creating a single world.
Where do you turn for instruction and inspiration?
Outside of the above, a lot of directors’ commentaries on DVDs. I find it a fascinating way to learn about different approaches to telling stories.
I like the director commentary approach. Never thought of that one before. I use music a lot as inspiration.
Barbara, I was just watching Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, and the DVD contains an interview with Mailer where he talks about, as the director, having to cut scenes that he realized weren’t serving any useful purpose, and complaining about the idiot of a screenwriter (Mailer, of course) who had put them in the script to begin with. With Stevie One, my recent story, I was always on the lookout for scenes that could be cut, and in one case I managed to have three different conversations going on at once (which saved a lot of time 🙂 ).