Ask the Author: Tim Arthur
Answered Questions (4)
Tim Arthur
Synthesis Beta! The biggest, most important thing for me right now is to establish this series. More content = more exposure, not to mention that I'm looking forward to writing some of the story's major moments.
Tim Arthur
First, write. That seems a given. Feeling silly about your own work is natural, and you'll have to get past it. Secondly, study. There's a lot of things to learn about narrative theory and self-editing that are huge aids to any writer. I spent more hours reading up on what makes a story tick than you might think, and I spent -way- more hours than even that on reviewing chapters to see how I could streamline story elements and have them tie in to each other. A short story can be a spontaneous thing, but for a full length novel you're going to do have to do a lot of narrative engineering.
Tim Arthur
Synthesis is based for a large part on my fascination for sci-fi and the future, but perhaps even more on the philosophies I was exposed to when attending university. I'm a big fan of a materialist world view, which is hardly an uncommon thing in the 21st century, yet I felt like most sci-fi was still coasting on the residue of spiritualism. Time and again, novels, games, and movies come out in which the existence of intelligent machines is justified by them having something akin to a soul, and that just seems to undermine the very purpose of sci-fi to me. So I wanted to write a story in which a materialist premise stood central. A world in which both men and machines are equal, because they're really no different.
Tim Arthur
By sitting down and getting to it. It will always happen that a chapter's difficult to write, or a character doesn't define as well as you would like, but all that means is that you have your work cut out for you. It makes no sense to respond to a challenge by doing nothing, in any other line of work that's suicide, so there's no reason why it'd be anything else for a writer.
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