Ask the Author: Ryan Guth
Answered Questions (4)
Ryan Guth
So glad you asked! I'm hip-deep in another "mixed-genre novel," tentatively titled Livings. Time: 1845-1850. Place: an isolated industrial village in the north of England. Characters: the famous Bronte family, four highly gifted, highly-strung adult siblings who for various reasons have failed to establish themselves in the outside world and now find themselves back in their childhood home with their father, an elderly Anglican pastor. One of the siblings is something of a theologian, one is an eloquent and inspiring feminist, one a pagan nature mystic, and one is a drunken sot. Stay tuned!
Ryan Guth
Body and Soul actually began as a series of conversations with an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and the stories I heard were so compelling that they sort of took me over. I've fictionalized where necessary for my own artistic purposes, but my ultimate goal has always been simply to articulate the emotional and psychological truth of those experiences.
Ryan Guth
Read as much as you can, write as much as you can, and find people who will give you honest feedback on your work. You don't have to respond or adjust your work to every comment you hear, but over time you'll build up a sort of "general reader" in your mind as an audience to aim at.
Ryan Guth
I try to store up ideas and projects as they occur to me. In fact, the idea for my current work in progress actually came to me seven years ago, when I was still in the middle of writing Body and Soul, so the idea sat in my head for five years before I got around to working on it. Thomas Hardy was very good at that kind of hoarding: during the 30 years he spent writing novels, he'd scribble down every idea for a poem that occurred to him, then he spent the next 30 years going through his slush pile.
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