Ask the Author: Steve Burt
Answered Questions (10)
Steve Burt
Finishing up the audio book for my Maine gargoyles novel, The Bookseller's Daughter, which recently won the NY Book Festival Grand Prize.
Steve Burt
When I went back to see the doctor I'd visited two days earlier to see if I was contagious, he was dead on the floor, his body a Petri dish for maggots now. Why hadn't this thing I'd contracted killed me, too?
Steve Burt
Robt. McCammon's post-apocalyptic Swan Song. Delia Owens's novel Where the Crawdads Sing, Trevor (biographical) Noah's Born a Crime.
Steve Burt
Yes. My FreeK Camp and FreeK Show psychic teen thrillers are set in Bridgton and Sebago Lake region of Maine, where I've been many times. It's an hour from my Maine summer residence (Wells). The third in the trilogy, FreeK Week, is set in Cassadaga, Florida, the "psychic medium capital of the world," an hour from my winter residence (The Villages). I had to visit there often, interviewed residents mediums, and read everything about the place so I'd be an expert before I wrote my book (which won the Grand Prize at the Florida Book Festival). My latest novel, The Bookseller's Daughter, about gargoyles in Wells, Maine (where I live) just won the New York Book Festival Grand Prize. And the 39 stories in my four collections (Odd Lot, Even Odder, Oddest Yet, and Wicked Odd) take place in towns I've lived in around New England. Sorry I didn't get your message until tonight, Joe. I don't check Goodreads very often.
Steve Burt
What really happened to the bully in my high school class who was found drowned near his boat on the ocean?
Steve Burt
I "noodle." I kick around an idea and create a few characters (loosely), then see if there's anything interesting. If not, or if it only works for a while, I toss it and try again. When I made up the stories for Even Odder, I was facing writer's block--constantly rewording first sentences, first paragraphs, first pages--because I thought I had to top the previous award-winning book, Odd Lot. But then I trusted the storyteller part of the brain and stepped away from the writer part of it that was so besieged by the picky editor who asked for perfection. I used the storyteller function by making up oral stories totally out of the blue--as if I were making up a nonsense story for a little child at bedtime--and let the story unfold. With a tape recorder and a dog needing to be walked for an hour each day, I was able to free my creative self. Only after I made up 40-some stories, many of which were terrible, did I select the top 15 and transcribe them to disk and edit them. They became a Bram Stoker Award Nominated collection. The other part of my answer is: I realize I'm never going to make much money at writing, so I write what's fun for me rather than what I think readers will like (or buy). Try to get back to those early pre-teen or teen years when the joy was in making stuff up, not worrying about who'd like it or how much you'd make on it.
Steve Burt
If I can't write through it, I may change projects for a while. Or, as with Even Odder after Odd Lot won so many awards (putting pressure on me for Even Odder to be even better), I switched to dictating short stories out of thin air while walking my dog every morning. I'd just start with an opening line and keep talking into the headset of my micro-cassette player. After forty-some days I had forty-some stories or fragments, from which I chose 15 to transcribe to diskette, edited, and published. The collection was a runner-up to Harry Potter for the 2003 Bram Stoker Award for Young Readers--all because I found a brain-shifting way around writer's block (changing sides of the brain, I guess).
Steve Burt
Watching a novel or story materialize. And because I don't outline, preferring instead the "discovery" method (throw your characters into a mess and let them react), I enjoy discovering a good book as author the same way my fans later discover it as readers. What's equally as much fun is having fans come up to my book booth at arts & crafts fairs to ask if the newest book (the one they don't have yet) is available, and can I sign it and take a picture with them.
Steve Burt
Writers write, wannabes wannabe.For years I had a big handmade cardboard poster on the wall above my computer monitor: I AM A WRITER. WRITE!
When I started, I wrote anything I could--stories, poems, anecdotes, haiku, articles, jokes--and published them in church newsletters, local newspapers, Pennysaver type freebies, anyplace I could publish. It was good practice. But learn to enjoy the writing, the creation itself. Have fun writing. If you find an audience, lucky you.
When I started, I wrote anything I could--stories, poems, anecdotes, haiku, articles, jokes--and published them in church newsletters, local newspapers, Pennysaver type freebies, anyplace I could publish. It was good practice. But learn to enjoy the writing, the creation itself. Have fun writing. If you find an audience, lucky you.
Steve Burt
My FreeKs psychic teen mysteries always take place in a week-long time frame. FreeK Camp and FreeK Week had each covered a week of summer camp in Bridgton, Maine. So when it came time to write FreeK Week,, I wanted to do two things: bring the kids to central Florida to solve murder mysteries and use a one-week time frame. Hence a week of spring break. Since Caroline is tuned into ghosts, what better place for a setting than Cassadaga, the psychic medium center of the world, where the teens all get psychic readings that provide clues and advance the plot. And with the FreeKs' mentors Rose, Twait, and Bando being former circus sideshow performers, it made sense to pick up a couple of characters (a snake handler and a giant) from Gibsonton, aka Freaktown USA, the town near Tampa that's heavily populated by circus and carnival people. Throw in a couple of murders and some gators, stir the pot, and there it is. Winner of the 2014 Mom's Choice Award.
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