Ask the Author: S.K. Kalsi
Answered Questions (6)
S.K. Kalsi
For The Stove-Junker, I took a trip back to my old hometown of Drums, PA. While there, I took many photographs and when I returned began to see how, despite the beauty of the landscape, there existed a deep sadness, loneliness, and undercurrent of violence. I took my feelings about what I experienced and connected it with my uncle's story of losing his daughter (my cousin) in a terrorist bombing. His grief, his pain, his neglect of the role he played in driving his daughter away became the basis of the novel.
S.K. Kalsi
If one needs "inspiration" to write then one needs to pick up something else to do. Everything becomes an inspiration if you look closely at it for long enough. Some image stands out from the background, some gesture, someone's face, or speech pattern, or a title will arise from the depths of nowhere and serve as the seed for a book or story.The way the light splashes through the trees, or the sound of the ocean lapping the shore, or a bird's lonely squall, everything can serve as inspiration if you just keep your mind open.
S.K. Kalsi
There's a novel-in-progress waiting my attention for the past few months as I have been finishing up a short story collection.
S.K. Kalsi
Read a lot and write a lot. Read your favorite books over and over again, first just to enjoy them, then to see how the writer produces the effect you feel. Then mimic those things in short pieces that only you will see. The goal is not just to be a master technician, but to develop a way of seeing the world, and especially people, especially their relationships, that is, how they connect or fail to connect with each other.
S.K. Kalsi
There's only one answer: Freedom. When you get to choose how you live your life, how to matter in this world, how to express yourself, you answer the why and what and where of your life's ultimate questions. So being a writer, for me, is a reclamation, no, a reinforcement of my identity as a human being. Through the creative life, I am much more keenly alive, my senses much more finely attuned. Also, I get to choose how much or how little to work everyday, even if what I choose to write seems gifted to me by my muse, subconscious, or those mysterious forces in the universe that guide my attention to this rather than that at just the precise moment.
S.K. Kalsi
This isn't an original thought, but I don't think there is a single "method." Methods, like short cuts, are meant to get one from one place to another quickly. I find that these don't work for me. So I don't look at it as "writer's block," but as opportunities to strengthen what's weak in a story. The best remedy is to walk away, give your subconscious the time it needs to reevaluate what's there. There is something the conscious mind can do as well. Since all structural problems relate to character, I take a look at character bios, traits, habits, attitudes, beliefs, relationships, etc. and see where I've fallen short. Usually in a couple days, sometimes weeks, a solution so perfect presents itself, leading me out of the quandary.
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