Ask the Author: Kelly Antoine
Answered Questions (6)
Kelly Antoine
Take a walk. Clean the house. Make a cup of coffee. Get the blood flowing. The words will come, but sometimes they're stubborn. Staring at a computer screen is no way to coax them out.
Kelly Antoine
Nothing is a better than hearing that someone really enjoyed your writing. Knowing that something you created held their attention and made them feel things and respond with joy or anger or guilt or humility.
I believe that literature made me a better person. It helped me relate to all kinds of people and situations that I would never have experienced were it not for books. If can only hope that some of my characters or strings of dialogue are also able to take readers somewhere new and broaden their perspectives on the full range of humanity.
I believe that literature made me a better person. It helped me relate to all kinds of people and situations that I would never have experienced were it not for books. If can only hope that some of my characters or strings of dialogue are also able to take readers somewhere new and broaden their perspectives on the full range of humanity.
Kelly Antoine
Writing is hard work. Really hard. The most important thing for me was to get to a place where I couldn't walk away from it. It can be tempting to stop and re-write awkward sentences, paragraphs, even chapters as you move along. For me, I had to power through until the end. If I didn't let the little imperfections go, I never would have finished. There will always be time to go back and edit later. But until you have the basic foundations of a beginning, middle, and end, you're in danger of letting the editing consume the entire project. Don't get bogged down with detail and poetry on your first draft. Just get to the end.
Kelly Antoine
I'm currently working on another novel - this one focused on a young doctor and her relationship with a comatose patient, Beth. The story also follows Beth's curious family, and their ongoing struggle to determine how long is too long to hope. It's both a mystery and a romance with little bit of bite to it.
Kelly Antoine
Inspiration is rarely the problem. Everything has a story behind it. An unanswered phone call. A crushed flower on the side of the road. A lost tube of lipstick. An awkward conversation with a stranger on a bus. There's a little bit of drama in even the most routine experiences. A little bit of fate and heartache and catharsis in everyday living. The difficult part of writing is deciding which of these stories are worth the sweat that it will take to tease them out of hiding. Finding the discipline to memorialize even a fleeting emotional reaction to see if it can turn into something truly compelling.
Kelly Antoine
Most of my writing is pulled from real-life experiences. A Mercy Killing is something of an abbreviated reflection on my deployment to Kuwait. While we were there I had a lot of conversations with the Chaplain. We talked about the difference between law - which is really just a system of rules for maintaining order - and morality, which is more about what is right or wrong, regardless of what the law says. We also had a dead horse outside post. I saw it dragged across the desert (much like the narrator describes it in the story). The image stuck with me for some time. I wanted to find a way to weave together those discussions about law and morality and the sad story of that horse, which is how A Mercy Killing ultimately came together.
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