Ask the Author: Amy P. Knight
Answered Questions (5)
Amy P. Knight
It's so much harder to be bored. Wherever I am, if there are people around, I can observe them and think about the lives they're living, and what kind of characters they are. I can listen to conversation and think about it as dialogue. In short, for me, being a writer makes strangers fascinating.
Amy P. Knight
Read with great attention. Read and re-read books you really enjoy and figure out how they're put together. Look at person, tense, scene structure, dialog vs. exposition, timelines, everything. All this stuff washes over you when you're reading for pleasure, and if it's done well, you don't notice it, but with careful study you can start to figure out how other people have done it.
Amy P. Knight
Lost, Almost had its genesis in stories a dear friend told me about his own childhood in Los Alamos. The Brooks family is by no means his family, but some of the incidents started out as true stories about the wacky things scientists sometimes do with their kids.
Amy P. Knight
I'm working on a new multi-part novel that deals, in various ways, with violence against women.
Amy P. Knight
I try to do something different. Work on a different part of the book, or revise an existing part, perhaps. Often when I'm feeling really stuck it's because I haven't thought the scene/chapter/story through fully enough, so I'll switch back to brainstorming and planning, which I do with a pen and paper. If I'm really really stuck, I'll pull out a book I loved reading and try dissecting a scene and creating my own version of it.
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