Ask the Author: Allene Symons
Answered Questions (6)
Allene Symons
As a journalist I am accustomed to working on deadline, and that brings on the adrenaline, but if I am writing on spec and don't have an actual deadline I have to trick myself into getting started or rebooting. I have created two visual ways of humoring myself into action: If I am stressed and twitchy and balking over plunging into a writing project, I look at a file card I have propped by my computer screen. It has a pasted-on image of John Stewart (lately of Daily Show) as if he is speaking his famous phrase "Settle!" To me, this means focus and get to work. The other file card has a pasted-on image of Eleanor Roosevelt and her famous phrase "Do one thing every day that scares you." Consulting this "mentor" quote helps when I need to push past a particularly stuck place (or when I need to figure out how to use yet another social media/online app or platform).
Allene Symons
Historical details inspire me, and so does a news item. A stage play or film (large or small screen) often triggers a blog, and I write four different blogs, usually one monthly for each. Observation of natural history, such as our Monarch butterfly shelter garden and urban critters, gives me ideas too. But I am mainly inspired by curious historical circumstances (and individuals) for my longer work. I also like to go into delicious detail about the earlier cultural periods that serve as the backdrop. Travel inspires me, too, as do art and artists.
Allene Symons
I have another narrative nonfiction project combining a research-memoir, a celebrity, and group biography in boom time California of the 1920s. Like my current book, it also involves long-forgotten, unpublished documents. This project was underway but set aside a dozen years ago when I found the lost hand photographs that led to writing my current book. I am still promoting Aldous Huxley's Hands, though, so this other book is on a slow simmer rather than a boil until I turn it up, probably in early 2017.
Allene Symons
First, don't give up your day job. I also found that I made the most progress toward my book-length projects while not working in writing/journalism jobs. Of course, those jobs helped strengthen my writing skills, but they were not when I made much headway because I mainly depleted my writing energy at the office. I'd also say do stay with a project if you believe in it. "Water the plant" by adding to it, whether it is sections of drafts or riffs or placing snippets of ideas in a hard copy and/or digital file to return to later.Many ideas have to ripen, often the marketplace for an idea does too. If you have projects in partial form don't feel guilty; it might take an opportunity (such as current news events) to inspire you to complete the project and submit it or a proposal to a publication or agent or publisher.
Allene Symons
I'd say the best thing is having a project simmering along, one I look forward to working on, returning to, and watching it take shape (or one I look ahead to starting next). I'd call it the satisfaction of writing-project continuity, despite the way we tend to live such fragmented daily lives.
Allene Symons
The story of how I came up with the idea for Aldous Huxley's Hands is at the heart of my book. A dozen years ago I found boxes in the garage containing 1000 labeled photographs of hands, photos taken almost half a century ago by my eccentric engineer father. One of those images of hands turned out to be the hands of the literary great Aldous Huxley. My astonishment that my dad had been an unlikely friend of Huxley's when I was a child was the departure point, call it the obsessive departure point, of my book.
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