Ask the Author: Carl T. Smith
Answered Questions (6)
Carl T. Smith
Terry Kay once told me to listen, that there are stories all around me, around everyone. It was good advice. Sometimes it's newspaper articles, idle gossip, something in history. For the present book, I lived in the area where the incident that is basis for the book took place. For Lowcountry Boil, it was a morning walk on Fripp Island with a neighbor who had been to prison, which I did not know until he told me. I was listening.
Carl T. Smith
Sometimes I'm not inspired. If I waited to be inspired, nothing would ever be put on paper. The objective is to write every day, even if I'm retyping what I wrote the day before.
Carl T. Smith
Pat Conroy says I write "Faction". My books usually have some basis in actual events though they are fiction. The present work is based on a disappearance of two people who disappeared and a business associate's "suicide", which no one accepts. It is character driven and one of the most difficult projects I have undertaken. For the moment, it is titled "A Time of Blood and Lies".
Carl T. Smith
First, Read. So you pick up a few tendencies. "My that sounds like Hemingway." So what? You will retain the good things in what you have written, get a lesson or two and then edit "Ernest" out. Second, don't be too judgmental about what you've written. It is doubtful you will ever have an objective eye about your own work. Don't listen to spouses, friends, and family about how brilliant you are; their eye is not objective either. Find a couple of people you know or a professional who is honest, owes you nothing and is literate to give you an opinion, and don't take their opinion as gospel. Use it to take another look at what you've done.
Carl T. Smith
Unlike my borderline careers as an actor and musician, I don't need anyone other than myself to be creative, and I'm never "out of work". It also allows me to see inside myself, good or bad.
Carl T. Smith
I step away for a day or so. Don't read, don't look at manuscript pages, don't read emails, just try to do something that has nothing to do with words. Have never had it last more than a day or so. Become mindless, so to speak.
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