Ask the Author: Robert Earle
Answered Questions (7)
Robert Earle
I think your personal story is wonderful and I hope it keeps going for a long time. In The Pickup there seems to be a necessary, radical erasure of a person's identity in return for a total immersion in an aesthetically barren and alien existence. There's a literary genre referred to as captive narratives; this isn't a captive narrative; but in such works, personalities (or "characters") do sometimes completely flip into strange cultural modes. Lord Jim by Conrad addresses this phenomenon, too. In that case, as I recall, Jim's naivete facilitates credibility. Anyway, my review was just one reader's assessment of a work of fiction that lost its power to convince and became, it seemed, a forced argument for accepting otherness.
Robert Earle
Today I'm going to keep working on a story about a girl who falls in love with her future husband's father, but then is forced to marry the son. The chief characters are Pompeia Paulina (descendent of Pompey the Great), Seneca the Elder and the more famous Seneca the Younger, a sickly young man touched by genius and a drive to exceed his father's accomplishments. The year is approximately 30 C.E. The arranged marriage becomes a close one, not because of bodies, but because of brains.
Robert Earle
I've never suffered writer's block. When I'm looking for something new to work on, however, I sometimes engage in what's called "webbing." Go to a book called "Writing the Natural Way" and you'll see how webbing works. The idea is to trick your critical mind into yielding the field to your creative mind. Dreams are universal evidence that every human being has rich resources of imagination to draw upon.
Robert Earle
The best thing about being a writer is having the opportunity to rewrite the world, re-experience the world, and discover what preoccupies you without your knowing it.
Robert Earle
Writers must write, whether it's journals, stories, novels, poems, plays, essays, whatever. It's no good talking about writing; you have to write. To write also you have to read. When you discover what you like to read, you'll probably learn a good bit about what you like to write. Finally, writing is hard and requires tenacity.
Robert Earle
I write every morning. My general inspiration to write actually has something to do with the word inspiration--I breathe in the world and then breathe it out.
Robert Earle
For the last year or so I've been concentrating on short fiction. I get my ideas most frequently from dreams, sometimes truncated into phrases. The phrase that appeared yesterday morning was, "The first man I loved was his father." The second source of ideas comes from what people tell me about their lives. Third, I reflect on my own life and reading. At the moment I'm asking myself questions about what makes Borges's short stories so effective and whether it makes sense to undertake a novel about the Roman philosopher Seneca.
About Goodreads Q&A
Ask and answer questions about books!
You can pose questions to the Goodreads community with Reader Q&A, or ask your favorite author a question with Ask the Author.
See Featured Authors Answering Questions
Learn more