Ask the Author: Lee Patton
Answered Questions (12)
Lee Patton
I've already explored a fictionalized version of a real-life mystery in my first novel, Nothing Gold Can Stay. For much more on how I changed reality and dramatized the mysterious event, please see my blog on my author page, On Pivoting between Reality and Invention.
Lee Patton
I haven't published any of them because I grew discouraged with playwriting in the late 90s and decided to focus on fiction. But I recently revised and updated an earlier play, so I guess I'm tip-toeing back into writing for the theatre. If you'd like to read any of my scripts in PDF form, I'd gladly send them. Let me know at lee_patton@hotmail.com. Thanks for your interest, Margaret!
Lee Patton
I would like to go back to Middlemarch in Victorian England and rescue Dorothea from her horrifying marriage to Causabon. I'd like to encourage her to further explore having fun with Will. I'd like to be a busybody among the Victorians, exalting pleasure and freedom and fighting the yoke of stifling convention.
Lee Patton
He woke at three-thirty, after two ceaseless hours of ever-shifting images from the Vietnam series he'd watched at midnight. Relived to have wakened, he went down the blue-black hallway for a glass of water, guided by a bright night light in the distance, but when he reached the kitchen, he was ambushed by a tiny, shrieking, burning person, her skin crinkling and blackening in embers, her white, conical hat afire.
Lee Patton
Re-reading the Victorian classic Middlemarch, a 900 pp monster. Finishing Underground Airlines. Starting No One Is Coming to Save Us and Between the World and Me; struggling through El Tiempo Entre Costuras for my Spanish class.
Lee Patton
Off the top of my head, I have to choose the most conventional, most expected answer: Elizabeth and Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. The reason is simple, too: I have never cheered so much, as a reader, for any couple to FINALLY seal their fate.
Lee Patton
I actually wrote the first draft of My Aim Is True when I wasn't much older than the narrator, Guy, who's 17. I was in my early twenties and fresh from living in San Francisco and the suburban Diablo Valley; it was so long ago that I can't really remember what drove me to the idea, exactly, except that I felt that old "cognitive dissonance" about the faddish behavior, mysticism, and narcissism of the times and wanted to explore the predicament of a kid who wanted to be genuine and down to earth in that crazy-making atmosphere.
Lee Patton
I'm usually driven by cognitive dissonance. Something is said or done or felt that I just can't process without finding a form--story, play, poem, essay--to get it out of my system. This could be anything, say, a difficult person's behavior or an impossibly comic conflict, and I can't rest until I've addressed it in writing. Then I feel like I've "resolved" the dissonance. (Even though I haven't really resolved a thing in reality, at least I can feel as if I have...)
Lee Patton
I'm clearing older projects off my desktop, revising, rethinking, and submitting a backlog of stories and plays before I take on anything new.
Lee Patton
I taught high school creative writing for years, and I know that everyone is capable of creating poems and stories. Anyone who can talk can write; even people without that capability can still have their thoughts transcribed. Writing isn't a mystery or anything mystic or sacred or lucky; it's just another way of communicating. So I guess I'm saying demystify it to yourself and avoid the idea that it's somehow different from other forms of communicating. Just do it.
Lee Patton
I really enjoy the process of writing itself, and finishing a draft always feels like I've met a challenge. Even more, I enjoy revising. So it's the best thing for society, too, keeping me off the streets.
Lee Patton
I avoid this question entirely. My problem so far (knock wood) is the opposite; a never-ending pull to keep writing story after story, not to mention plays, poems, novels, and nonfiction pieces. I've been writing fiction since age 14, but take breaks now and then for sanity's sake.
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