Ask the Author: Lindsey Byrd
Answered Questions (10)
Lindsey Byrd
Dinotopia. I want to go to Dinotopia and visit the museums and the archives and find my dinosaur partner. I want to get given a job in Dinotopia and I hope it's with something historical. I would love to write the history of Dinotopia.
Lindsey Byrd
I need to catch up on the VE Schwab books that have been published while I've been doing my graduate school studies. I keep seeing them in the bookstore, and I need to get around to actually reading them now!
Lindsey Byrd
I think one of the biggest mysteries is a dream I had that I remember with perfect clarity. I remember it so clearly, it feels like a memory, but I know it cannot be real. I was kneeling on the floor of my childhood home, next to the coffee table in the family room. I had a ring in my hand with an E on it, and when I dropped it - it fell through the floor. The brick floor. Everyone got very upset about it, and then insisted we can never talk about it or mention it again. Obviously it couldn't have happened, and yet: I am curious about it.
Lindsey Byrd
The night before she sent her PhD thesis to the committee, her login credentials stopped working. By the time the sun rose, it was too late: someone else had taken her name and her thesis, and they presented it in her stead.
Lindsey Byrd
Generally when I have writer's block I try to look at what the problem is. Is it a craft problem? Am I struggling because I don't know where the story wants to go? Or am I uncertain about a plot point and don't want to continue until that plot point gets resolved? Usually writer's block happens to me when there's a tangle in the narrative that needs to be untangled. Going for walks, talking out loud, and writing scenes from later in the book can help with it. And, so can re-reading the book as it's been written and seeing where I as a *reader* feel like the story should go. Rather than looking at it from an author perspective, what do I love about the story as a reader? That can help remind me why I'm writing it and what problems need to be adjusted.
Lindsey Byrd
Research. I love learning new things, and when I get an idea sometimes I can't bring it to reality without studying up on the particulars. I love researching it and learning about the world and all it's idiosyncrasies. I'd never known half the stuff I knew if I wasn't thinking about writing a book. It makes the world so much more fascinating when put into a fiction perspective.
Lindsey Byrd
Write, even if it's bad. My first written works were *terrible*. But if I'd never written them, then I never would have learned what worked and didn't work for me. I never would have grown. Just keep practicing. If it's what *you* love to do, then don't stop.
Lindsey Byrd
A couple of different things simultaneously. I love the universe in "On the Subject of Griffons" so I'm playing more there, but I'm also working on something entirely different that plays more into the magical realism section of fiction rather than pure fantasy.
Lindsey Byrd
Sometimes I feel like the best visual representation of this is rain on a window. A droplet hits the pain, starts to slide down, then it connects with another droplet, then another, then another, so on and so forth until they stream out at the bottom. I'm not sure what the trigger is always, it could be as simple as hearing a new word for the first time. But once I hear that word, it connects to endless other possibilities and suddenly a story takes shape that I have to write into reality.
Lindsey Byrd
There was a prompt on Tumblr for "Give me the title of a book and a pairing and I'll give you a summary of a book I'll never write." Well, it turns out that the response I got was more than enough to interest me into writing the book I said I wouldn't.
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