In A Category Of My Own
I'm just realising what I can actually do here on Goodreads. It's really quite refreshing in its options, much more so than the other sites I'm on. Just now I discovered I had to turn on the "ask the author" facility, which is part of the reason I registered on here. Instantly, the Goodreads robot fired a series of unanswerable questions at me. I'm assuming these must be among the most frequently asked. Well I'm sorry, but in my case you guys are going to have to be a whole lot more inventive. My answers to all those questions were something like "No", "I don't", "Not applicable", "Who cares about that?", "Hey, that's private!", or "Who am I to tell other people what they should do?!"
It was once said by a fairly well known author I'm afraid I can't remember, that writers are generally pretty weird folk in one way or another, and that the weirdest kind of writers are poets. Even other writers think poets are weird. Instead of being two steps away from the stereotypical "ordinary person", as most writers are, they are about five steps away. Please excuse my dreadful paraphrasing, but that's where I'm coming from. I started out as a poet, and for the first five years (1983-88) I was writing I wrote nothing at all apart from poems and songs (which for me at least were a whole different ballgame,) with but one exception. I only moved beyond that field briefly because I rediscovered my childhood love of Doctor Who through another fan who had written a (rejected) script for the show. I read it and I thought "That's a good idea", so in the summer of 1986 I wrote my own, "The Eye Of The Storm". That was my introduction to the idea of the "Full Length MS" as the Demigods in their ivory towers refer to large scale projects. It was mid-1989 before I attempted anything so lengthy again (on that occasion a surreal and occasionally horrific short novel I called "Remember Helen Latham...?" which was in fact heavily inspired by some of my own poetry).
More than three decades later I still think of myself as a poet even though I haven't written a poem since 1988. I have always had my own unique way of approaching the "work" of writing, and at the moment I'm not really writing anything. I don't think of myself as a writer anymore. I have always had many interests and pastimes, and writing is currently on the backburner. I feel like the custodian of a great legacy with the work on my plate right now. Because most of what I'm working with is drawn from my huge unpublished back catalogue and a lot of it is very old, I don't even feel like the same person that wrote a lot of it. It's often hard for me to remember how I felt or what I was driving at all those years ago. The person who might have been able to answer a lot of your more run of the mill questions just isn't around anymore. I'm a different person at 54 to the person I was when I was 25 or 40 or any other age. I have evolved. But the work of those other people I used to be remains the same. Some of it I actually find quite embarrassing now, though at the time I wrote it I thought it was awesome, so I'm sincerely hoping that somebody who hasn't been around it forever and grown disenchanted with it like I have might think that too.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that if you're going to ask me a question you need to be creative with it. It needs to be tailor-made for the situation I find myself in if you're expecting an answer of more than four words. When you've actually read my book it will be very plain to you what kind of questions I will be willing and able to answer.
If I were you I wouldn't ask any questions that begin with "What did you mean when you said...." because for me, part of the art of writing is leaving the right things open to interpretation and invoking the audience's imagination. Don't ask me to fill in the gaps. You're supposed to be doing that yourselves.
It was once said by a fairly well known author I'm afraid I can't remember, that writers are generally pretty weird folk in one way or another, and that the weirdest kind of writers are poets. Even other writers think poets are weird. Instead of being two steps away from the stereotypical "ordinary person", as most writers are, they are about five steps away. Please excuse my dreadful paraphrasing, but that's where I'm coming from. I started out as a poet, and for the first five years (1983-88) I was writing I wrote nothing at all apart from poems and songs (which for me at least were a whole different ballgame,) with but one exception. I only moved beyond that field briefly because I rediscovered my childhood love of Doctor Who through another fan who had written a (rejected) script for the show. I read it and I thought "That's a good idea", so in the summer of 1986 I wrote my own, "The Eye Of The Storm". That was my introduction to the idea of the "Full Length MS" as the Demigods in their ivory towers refer to large scale projects. It was mid-1989 before I attempted anything so lengthy again (on that occasion a surreal and occasionally horrific short novel I called "Remember Helen Latham...?" which was in fact heavily inspired by some of my own poetry).
More than three decades later I still think of myself as a poet even though I haven't written a poem since 1988. I have always had my own unique way of approaching the "work" of writing, and at the moment I'm not really writing anything. I don't think of myself as a writer anymore. I have always had many interests and pastimes, and writing is currently on the backburner. I feel like the custodian of a great legacy with the work on my plate right now. Because most of what I'm working with is drawn from my huge unpublished back catalogue and a lot of it is very old, I don't even feel like the same person that wrote a lot of it. It's often hard for me to remember how I felt or what I was driving at all those years ago. The person who might have been able to answer a lot of your more run of the mill questions just isn't around anymore. I'm a different person at 54 to the person I was when I was 25 or 40 or any other age. I have evolved. But the work of those other people I used to be remains the same. Some of it I actually find quite embarrassing now, though at the time I wrote it I thought it was awesome, so I'm sincerely hoping that somebody who hasn't been around it forever and grown disenchanted with it like I have might think that too.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that if you're going to ask me a question you need to be creative with it. It needs to be tailor-made for the situation I find myself in if you're expecting an answer of more than four words. When you've actually read my book it will be very plain to you what kind of questions I will be willing and able to answer.
If I were you I wouldn't ask any questions that begin with "What did you mean when you said...." because for me, part of the art of writing is leaving the right things open to interpretation and invoking the audience's imagination. Don't ask me to fill in the gaps. You're supposed to be doing that yourselves.
No comments have been added yet.
