Ask the Author: Alice C. Early
Answered Questions (6)
Alice C. Early
A key relationship in The Moon Always Rising between the main character, Eleanor "Els Gordon, and the ghost/jumbie was inspired by my moving into the home of my now-husband (a widower) where he had retained many artifacts of his late wife, whom I'd never met. We've since made that home very much "ours," but in the beginning I was surrounded by enough possessions, letters, artwork, even clothing she'd left behind that her "presence" was palpable. Mining that experience helped me create Els, who buys an abandoned Nevis plantation house left intact by the previous owner, Jack Griggs, a suspected suicide. The house and its contents help her learn about Nevis and start over in the new life she's chosen.
Alice C. Early
Inspiration comes from the most diverse of sparks. I read extensively and eclectically, but film, the news, my travels, conversations with friends or something I hear on NPR while driving around might send me scurrying for a pad and pen to jot down an idea. Most of them never go anywhere but I squirrel them all away and sift through them from time to time. Sometimes several of these sparks join together and I see a real idea forming.
Alice C. Early
I'm writing my second novel, Posthumous, set in New York City in 2017, about a literary power couple with secrets from each other and the world. It has a non-traditional structure, including a book within a book. The idea began forming after a dear friend dropped dead suddenly, having known she was at risk for exactly that fate. Her death got me thinking about what it must be like to live with a health time bomb, how you reconcile to it, and how you might script whatever remains of your life.
Alice C. Early
Dont give up. I left off creative writing when I graduated college and went off to earn a living. I didn't revisit my early passion for writing fiction until early in the 21st century. It took me most of 20 years to complete my debut novel. If you want to be a writer and be known as a writer, you have to write--even just a little every day. As importantly, you have to think of yourself as a writer and take your writing seriously. Nobody else will until you do. Give yourself space and time to write. Be a little (or a lot) selfish if necessary. If you can, say NO to at least some of the things that suck away your time and energy.
Alice C. Early
Making stuff up, no question. I love character development, throwing "what if's" into the dark when I can't sleep at night and inviting my characters to talk to me. I often have to let them drag me in directions I didn't mean to go. If your characters are well-conceived, they will take on lives of their own. That's fascinating to me. I also love revision. It's like sculpting, trying to extract the essence of what I was trying to do from all the excess verbiage surrounding it. Trying to get just the right word, and the right order of words. When I think I've found it, that's magic.
Alice C. Early
Poorly. I'm not a happy camper if I'm not writing fiction steadily, but I've never found time or discipline to write it daily. From mid-2019 until recently, I couldn't seem to write fiction at all. My day job requires crafting non-fiction, business materials, and documents that come from a different part of my brain. I let my fiction brain idle too long and it closed up and wouldn't let me back in. My characters stopped talking to me. I felt I'd lost them. I got out of that stalemate by putting myself on deadline. Because I wanted to apply for a residency that required a writing sample, I read the fragments of my second novel to see if I could use any of them and that made me fall back in love with that book and those characters. They aren't yet babbling away to me in the middle of the night, but they are stretching from a long sleep and coming back alive. I never felt "blocked" just "estranged" from my book. I'm making amends and hope she'll welcome me back so we can finish the task.
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