Greetings, all!
My favorite author is Elmore Leonard (R.I.P.), wish he were still around so I could ask him the following questions (I’ll give my answers in parentheses after):
1. What made you become a writer? (Writing is my calling; I go insane when I don’t write.)
2. Where do you take your inspiration from? (My twisted imagination, the environment around me, life experience, and my loved ones.)
3. Do you edit as you go or save it until the 2nd draft? (My personality type requires order so I edited as I went along when I wrote Splinters of the Soul. Write a few pages, edit at the beginning of the next session, write more pages, rinse, repeat.)
4. What satisfaction do you get from writing? (There’s something inside of me that needs to get out… recording those thoughts clears the slate to allow new ideas to come to fruition.)
5. Do you set aside X hours to write daily, do you have a schedule? (I hadn’t in the past but I’m juggling work, the gym, and a 2 hour commute; I’m exhausted by the time I get home. I’m in the process of shifting my body clock so that I wake up at 4AM, write for 2 hours, go to the gym and then work… I plan to be in bed by 9PM so that I get 6-7 hours of sleep.)
6. Do you ever get writer’s block or some equivalent condition? (I never run out of ideas but I get what I like to call “chaos”; I can’t write when my world is turned upside-down.)
7. Is it possible to keep the joy of writing while dealing with the business of writing? (I’ve found that discipline is required to compartmentalize the two, keep them in separate silos; one silo contains pure happiness while the other contains a necessary evil! )
8. Do you back into predetermined endings or cross that bridge organically when you get there? (I read in Stephen King’s On Writing that he only backed into an ending once in his career and it was the story he liked the least. I had ideas for the Splinters ending but trusted The Muses instead. You gotta’ leave room for the magic to happen, as my artist friend Sarita would say.)
9. Do you always follow your heart or do you allow yourself to be influenced by current trends? (My novel was influenced by two successful stories, non-vanilla stories. I’m an emotional,sensitive, ‘heart-on-his-sleeve’ kind of cat… don’t know how I could give a story my all if I were “faking the funk”.)
10. Who do you write for, who is your audience? (Me; I’m my audience. I’m a demanding reader,have been since I was a kid. I wrote a story I wanted to read… the fact that quite a few other people got hooked on it was the cherry on top.)
Sean Thompson 