Ask the Author: Thaisa Frank
Answered Questions (7)
Thaisa Frank
Elizabeth Bennet bowed to the Victorian tenet that women must be married. But she demanded an equal marriage--& got it!. Jane Eyre & Mr. Rochester were reduced to the bare bones of survival--& reunited. Captain Noonan & Amelia Earhart lived parallel, yet intertwined lives in I WAS AMELIA EARHART by Jane Mendelssohn. What I look for is a sense of the *relationship*--whether stormy or idyllic or both.
Thaisa Frank
I don't believe in writer's block. I believe that all writers have fallow periods. The 4 am Breakthrough is good for prompts, although I don't use them. Also want to plug Finding Your Writer's Voice with St. Martin's press, originally a hardcover, then paperback and now out in e-book. Check it out on Amazon!
Thaisa Frank
Finishing. I love knowing what the story is about. I feel as though I've completed an assignment and answered a riddle.
Thaisa Frank
Declare yourself as an authority. Authority is what makes people listen. Filter advice. In general, avoid workshops and show your work when you know that it's done--know the shape. Otherwise people will see parts and suggest the wrong complements--as if it were a different jigsaw puzzle. Trust your voice.
Thaisa Frank
A novel and a new collection of short fiction at the same time. One of my stories is a finalist in a Narrative competition and a new story "Thread" is being published by Jones Street. I also write flash fiction and when I do a collection I like to intersperse longer fiction with flash. "The Strange Attractor" will be in an anthology soon.
Thaisa Frank
I don't "get" my ideas. Fiction comes to me in images. Flaubert said "It's not the pearls it's the way they're strung together." I get the pearls first and the strings begin to form. At some point, I can see what the story is doing and it tells me what to do with it to make it whole.
Thaisa Frank
Again, I don't "get" : ) It's not something I can buy at a store or meditate on. These things come to me from my imagination and the imagination has an interesting way of intersecting with the world. For e.g, in my book Heidegger's Glasses (not an historical novel, by the way), I could see people in an underground mine answering letters. I had no idea that there was a way to make sense of this in terms of what the Reich was doing. Things began to fit together like a puzzle. Whatever "research" I needed to do, I did after I wrote the book, and sometimes during.
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