Ask the Author: Mark Patrick Lynch
Answered Questions (6)
Mark Patrick Lynch
My most recent book - as i write this - is A CLASH OF ICHOR AND BLOOD. It came about because i wanted to write something set around the area in which I grew up, and to make use of a folly I used to play about in when I was a kid. It was perched on the top of a ridge, in an alarming state of disrepair, and quite dangerous. Rumours of ghosts (a headless highwayman) and dark things happening there abounded. In other words, it was the perfect place to pull into a story. So I had the setting, and a character name, Rusby Once. I wanted a choppy first line, and wound up with : Weird 24. And things progressed from there, resulting in a sort of crossover/YA dark portal-fantasy novel. I'd say go read it to see what you think of it, but that might be a bit cheeky.
Mark Patrick Lynch
Sunlight helps. Other people's books help. Avoiding the pressure and stresses of "real life" helps. The memory of the pleasure of writing helps, and of those other worlds and lives it is possible to live by putting pen to paper, finger to keyboard, or however else you may get your stories out.
Mark Patrick Lynch
I tend to have a number of things on the go at once. It helps when you get stuck, if you can jump to a short story instead of the novel you're working on, or the other way around. So I have a few novels in various stages of incompleteness, some short stories i need to tighten or edit, or start writing. For the last nearly three years (since 2015) I have been struggling with a really long, awkward book. It's over 200,000 words long in its earliest drafts and possibly needs to be longer. Or shorter. And I have a bunch of stories I want to shuffle together to form a variety of short story collections, as well as one short story collection that I think may really be an episodic novel of sorts. Maybe.
Mark Patrick Lynch
The old truth is the truest truth of all. The only way you're going to be a writer is by writing. So write. And read. And write. And read. Also, don't be put off that you're never going to be Dickens. Dickens was Dickens. No one else was and no one else will be. Be you. No one else is you. No one else will be you. So write. You. Do it. And read. And write. And read.
Mark Patrick Lynch
You get to live other lives. I have whole worlds in my experience that I didn't have before I wrote about them.
Mark Patrick Lynch
By writing something else. Block is as much about getting to a tricky bit and not knowing how to go on as it is about anything else. So put your mind elsewhere, write something else, edit a piece, read a writer friend's work and edit that for them, and then look at your stuff again. Where you were blocked you'll find you are either still stuck or that any old line will do to get you past the block. Once you've passed it, if it still bugs you, go back to it later. If all of this fails, take up farming.
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