Q&A with Lorina Stephens discussion
Questions for Lorina
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message 51:
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Robert
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Sep 23, 2009 08:36PM
That's very reassuring. But I would really like to see a larger audience for both your novels. Is there anything readers can do to help spread the word, other than just old fashioned word of mouth?
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1. Ask, beg, harass your local bookstores (whether a chain or indie) to carry my books. If they have an account with Ingram, (which most booksellers do in one form or another)they can order directly through Ingram. Failing that Five Rivers does direct distribution.
2. If you have a blog or subscribe to reading lists or groups make recommendations with links to either online chain booksellers or directly to Five Rivers (http://www.5rivers.org).
3. If you are part of a writers or reading group, consider discussing or recommending my books. I'm also available for lectures and workshops, although there may, of necessity, have to be travel costs involved. We can also arrange an online meeting through SKYPE or Messenger or any number of other services.
4. If you read my books write your reviews of them on book groups such as this, as well as post them to online booksellers such as Amazon (a really huge advantage to authors and publishers), Chapters and others around the world. Just because I'm Canadian doesn't mean my books are only available in Canada. All Five Rivers' books are available worldwide.
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The Process
It's what I call the act of writing -- The Process.
For me writing is almost ritualistic, definitely fraught with fidgeting and distractions, just as I'm doing right now by blogging about The Process. Writing is a necessarily solitary, will-sapping endeavour that if I'm lucky renders an article, a short story, if I'm really determined, a novel.
Music is part of that process. All kinds of music, depending on what it is I'm writing, which, for these next months is my latest novel, From Mountains of Ice. The music helps set the tone for me, lure me into the discipline required to sit still and allow my thoughts to enlarge to the point I can encompass a world, a people, a story worth telling.
The music for this novel (which was From Mountains of Ice ranges from the Benedictine Monks of Santo Dominigo singing Gregorian Chants, and the Russian Easter service to the score from Pan's Labyrinth and Gladiator, then to Johnny Whitehorse's Totemic Flute Chants, Dead Can Dance and Delirium.
Even with music, however, it's easy to find every excuse to avoid writing. I twitch. I ride my recumbent bike when the twitching becomes unbearable. I check email. Check Facebook. Check Chapters Community. I scritch the cats, look out the loft windows where now the trees are stripped to dark limbs and flies smash against the glass like kamikaze pilots, eventually gluing themselves in a gas of death. I pivot in the large, blue chair and look out to the east, down the length of the loft where pink insulation bulges against the confines of plastic vapour barrier, waiting for next year when the roof will be clad in steel, and then wallboard to be applied inside. I study the enormous purlins of what I think is butternut and devise interior designs in my head that will allow those purlins to remain exposed once the loft is renovated.
I chide myself and turn back to the computer screen, re-read what I've written in the past hour, hesitate to continue with the scene, brutalize myself into tapping out the next sequence until the thoughts run dry again, usually at a transition, and once again the whole process turns again.
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The Power of Names
Discussion among some of my colleagues arose a little while ago regarding naming practices in fiction. I must admit I was a little appalled at some of their responses. One writer chose to take an ordinary name and spell it backward to give it a funky, other-world sound, thus David would become Divad, or Susan become Nasus.
Another writer chose to give places people names, and people place names, so that David became a country, and Arnprior became the man who lived there, and Susan would be the village where Arnprior meets Peterborough.
Confused yet? I was. All I could think was: what happened to the Rule of 30? Of keeping your reader engaged, interested, in preventing at every mark of 30 -- 30 words, 30 lines, 30 seconds, 30 minutes -- your reader closing the book, permanently. By stepping too far out of the known you, as a writer, risk losing your reader to any of a myriad of other distractions.
Even more, I wondered what happened to the concept of the power of names, of a name fitting a place or character, of speaking to the fundamental, instinctive part of our natures?
Words, and names, are filled with nuances, subtleties. For instance take the word horse. Now, you could have a horse, but you could also have a pony, or a stallion, a mare or a foal, a gelding, a plug, a dray, a roan, a bay. You could have a charger, a thoroughbred, a palomino, an Arabian. And with the use of each of these words you create an entire mood, an expectation on the part of the reader. Certainly you wouldn't have a plug under a knight, and if you did you'd have someone called Don Quixote, another whole flavour of knight.
Aware of these nuances, when I come to name the characters in my novels, I choose names carefully, even researching the meaning of the name. Perhaps that's as silly as spelling a name backward, but I'll lay you odds not.
For instance, in the novel From Mountains of Ice, which is to be released September 1, one of my characters is Maponos O Leannain. The given name is from Celtic origin and means Divine Son, or god of youth and music. Given this character has a reputation as a singer, it was fitting. The surname means little cloak, which figures prominently in the clothing worn by the cucullati in the novel. Equally, one of the prominent female characters in the novel is Aletta, who is a strega (Italian for witch), but in this culture strega means a truthsayer. Aletta, a name that harks back to ancient Greece and Rome, means truth.
It is perhaps unnecessary to go to the lengths I do in order to name characters, but I do think a little more attention should be given to the nuances and connotations of names. If you're going to spend time choosing just the right word in your writing, then shouldn't equal consideration be given to names? I think so.
