1.
What inspired you to write your newest story? I have always been interested in novels set in academia
as well as literary crime novels, and What
Has Become of You gives the reader a bit of both. Due to a variety of
macabre influences in my youth, most notably having four older brothers with a
taste for the macabre, I’ve had a lifelong curiosity about the darker side of
human nature and what that says about us as a larger society. I also enjoyed playing
with the idea of a protagonist who over-identifies with her students and, as a
result, does everything wrong.
2.
What challenges did you have in writing it? Writing about the murder of several young girls brought
me to a tough place emotionally, but I had to push my way through that sense of
recoil. And creating Vera, my less than perfect protagonist, required a certain
amount of letting-go as well; I was tempted at times to clean her up, to make
her more admirable, but I felt that keeping her flaws intact was important to
the story.
3.
This thriller revolves around the murder of a young
woman. Why are so many stories built around the loss of someone? Loss is our greatest fear, and it is all the more
fearsome because loss is unavoidable. We all are doomed to experience it at
some point—most of us more than once. And although all loss is always painful,
a loss that is greatly unexpected and unjust—the death of a vibrant young
person under barbaric circumstances, for example—is something that grips our
national consciousness. We idealize
youth and innocence even when we know that youth isn’t all it’s cracked up to
be.
4.
What do you find most rewarding about being a writer? For me, it’s the process itself. When the writing is
going well… when the sentences start taking on a fluidity and start humming
with life… when the ideas start to coalesce and I know I’m writing something
that’s true to my own voice and not quite like anyone else’s… that’s when the
feeling of being a writer is most intoxicating. If the writing eventually sees the light of
publication and finds its audience… well, that’s just gravy.
5.
Your book is set in New England. What is it about that
area that fascinates you and your readers? Having
lived most of my life in New England and coming from a long line of Mainers,
this is definitely the region with which I have the most firsthand experience.
Being a dyed-in-the-wool New Englander is its own funny thing. We are proud
people but also inherently modest, not liking to call a lot of attention to ourselves,
preferring remote observation to stepping forward (the mere act of publishing a
book goes somewhat against the New England character, even though our literary
tradition that extends way back). There is also a great deal of Puritanism that
is still alive and well in parts of New England. A true New Englander values
things like thrift and ingenuity and
simplicity. I always say that I am a complex woman with simple tastes, and this
simplicity comes straight out of my New England background. From a writing perspective, I like creating stories in which complex characters
can pop against simple backdrops.
6.
Any advice for struggling writers out there? Read! Read as though your life depends on it, because it
does. The worst mistake that any writer can make is to not be well-read enough
and to not be well-versed in our rich literary history. Engage with the text to
make note of the author’s sentence structures, the use of imagery, the
selection of particular detail. Why were these choices made? What do these choices
achieve? Read from a ‘reverse engineering’ standpoint, where you are taking the
text apart in order to see how the author fit it all together. That’s the best
way to learn your craft, consciously and unconsciously.
7.
Where do you see book publishing heading? I keep my eye blissfully trained away from the publishing
trends, so I’m not one to foretell what ‘the next big thing’ is going to be.
But what I do strongly feel is that the publishing industry is alive and well
and not nearly as endangered as some seem to think. I was just at the AWP
Conference in Minneapolis and was staggered by the number of booths in the Book
Fair—staggered! Publishing companies in the thousands, ones I’d never even
heard of, turning out good books not just because it is a business but because
they still have such a tenacious belief in the power of the written word. It’s
enough to give anyone hope.
RESOURCE OF THE YEAR
2015 Book PR &
Marketing Toolkit: All New
Brian Feinblum’s
views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of
his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him
at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the
third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.