Ask the Author: John Auber Armstrong
Answered Questions (6)
John Auber Armstrong
Invest in a good desk chair.
John Auber Armstrong
The high pay and respect from the rest of society, the knowledge that what you write so greatly affects society and has such an immediate impact on social policy and attitudes, and the access to strong drugs which allow you to believe the above.
Probably the best thing is that you come to appreciate fine writing even more. The downside is you can't help but mentally rewrite and edit everything you read.
Probably the best thing is that you come to appreciate fine writing even more. The downside is you can't help but mentally rewrite and edit everything you read.
John Auber Armstrong
I don't get it. If I can't think of what to do where I currently am in a book, I edit what I've already done and usually find I carry on writing when I get to where I left off before. Or I work on something else among the things I've made notes on or ideas I've pout down for Later.
To me, writer's block means most often you've come to fork in the story and don't know which way to go. In which case I always think of Raymond Chandler's advice "Whenever you don't know what happens next, have someone come through the door with a gun."
I generally follow that, metaphorically or, sometimes, literally. Because sometimes someone coming through the door with a gun is Just What's Needed.
(And by following it metaphorically, I mean introduce something unexpected, shake shit up, mess with the plan. Car trouble, illness, Death From Above, red tape, etc. Because the real world messes with our plans all the time.)
In the last book things were going a little too easily for my characters, things moving along in just too trouble-free a fashion, so I looked at where they were and what they were doing and said, "Gee, situation like that, you could break an ankle if you're not careful" and ... no points awarded for guessing correctly.
That busted ankle gummed up their plans and forced them to be more resourceful (and more interesting) and opened the door to what ended up happening next.
Lastly, when trying to figure aforementioned What Happens Next - and the author is in that place long before the reader (he hopes) gets there - I follow Allen Ginsberg's dictum, "First thought, best thought."
No matter what comes into my head first, I do it. My head has been doing a lot more thinking about the book than I have, and I trust it.
To me, writer's block means most often you've come to fork in the story and don't know which way to go. In which case I always think of Raymond Chandler's advice "Whenever you don't know what happens next, have someone come through the door with a gun."
I generally follow that, metaphorically or, sometimes, literally. Because sometimes someone coming through the door with a gun is Just What's Needed.
(And by following it metaphorically, I mean introduce something unexpected, shake shit up, mess with the plan. Car trouble, illness, Death From Above, red tape, etc. Because the real world messes with our plans all the time.)
In the last book things were going a little too easily for my characters, things moving along in just too trouble-free a fashion, so I looked at where they were and what they were doing and said, "Gee, situation like that, you could break an ankle if you're not careful" and ... no points awarded for guessing correctly.
That busted ankle gummed up their plans and forced them to be more resourceful (and more interesting) and opened the door to what ended up happening next.
Lastly, when trying to figure aforementioned What Happens Next - and the author is in that place long before the reader (he hopes) gets there - I follow Allen Ginsberg's dictum, "First thought, best thought."
No matter what comes into my head first, I do it. My head has been doing a lot more thinking about the book than I have, and I trust it.
John Auber Armstrong
Three novels and a non-fiction humour book about Getting Old called The Back Nine.
As in golf - closer to the end than the beginning and the clubhouse in sight ....
As in golf - closer to the end than the beginning and the clubhouse in sight ....
John Auber Armstrong
Fifteen years at a daily newspaper disabused me of the idea that I require inspiration to begin writing. Inspiration comes most often while you're writing, not before. Beyond that, inspiration is really only a very small part of writing. My rough guess is that 99 per-cent is craft, and like any craftsman the more you do, the better you get, and the more skill you develop.
Oddly, the more skill you hone, the more you can take advantage of the brief, transitory, and wholly unreliable moments of inspiration which do come.
So the First Rule of Writing is always, "Place Ass on Chair, Begin Typing."
Oddly, the more skill you hone, the more you can take advantage of the brief, transitory, and wholly unreliable moments of inspiration which do come.
So the First Rule of Writing is always, "Place Ass on Chair, Begin Typing."
John Auber Armstrong
Woke up from a dream and had it, at least the central character and the situation that drives the story. First time that's happened to me and I was chuffed that this was going to be easy .... as it was all laid out for me.
Hah.
The easy part is the "idea" - it's the fleshing it out with supporting characters, developing the world they're in in a consistent manner so it hangs together and doesn't come apart if you pull at the seams, the ancillary action that fills in the day-to-day, what the characters do (and it's not always what you had planned for them, honestly.) In fact, as you go along and they become real people to you, development determines action. They have to behave in a manner true to character, which can change things substantially. Yes, now I know how Bog feels.
Anyway, what I woke up with was a character who turned out to be quite insubstantial until I wrote him - I really only had a vague mental image of him and an age (17.) I didn't even realize he was black until about page 40. (it's not a huge Thing in the book, just a detail) - and a sense of the society, the Inside city and the one Outside the Wall. The rest I had to come up with the old fashioned way, by staring off into space and sweating over the page.
Mostly, I get an idea of the "What If ..." sort and see where it goes. If it keeps going, it's a book. If not, I file it away for possible use in something else as background or plot facet/angle. Ideas are precious, you never know when you'll need one.
Sometimes a quote will set one off - the new book, Schadenfreude, Inc., got its start when I read someone saying of one of our Earthly atrocities - Syrian snipers targeting schoolchildren waiting for the bus, I believe - "This is why the other intelligent species of the universe have not contacted us."
"What if it was precisely why they contacted us, because we were the only known species where such horrors occur?" And that was enough to cause about 50 pages of notes, research, stuff compiled while I was writing Sugar.
Mob Rule came from an observation while I was working at a daily newspaper, that the only real difference between the Govt. and the Mob was that Those in Charge hadn't gotten around to running whores, yet. They were already in the gambling (lotteries) and drugs (tobacco, alcohol, marijuana eventually) businesses and like the Mob they showed scant regard for the law, disregarding whichever ones they found annoying or inconvenient.
It was a hop, skip, and small extrapolation to a world where the Depression saw a Second Revolution, this one more kin to the Reign of Terror, with politicians, lawyers, and other authorities swinging from the lampposts. In the anarchy that followed, the only group organized enough to take control and establish order was ... Organized Crime. That led to Moliere's statement that “If Satan should ever replace God he would find it necessary to assume the attributes of Divinity” and 351 pages and 100,000 words later, I was done.
Yes, it was just that easy .....
Hah.
The easy part is the "idea" - it's the fleshing it out with supporting characters, developing the world they're in in a consistent manner so it hangs together and doesn't come apart if you pull at the seams, the ancillary action that fills in the day-to-day, what the characters do (and it's not always what you had planned for them, honestly.) In fact, as you go along and they become real people to you, development determines action. They have to behave in a manner true to character, which can change things substantially. Yes, now I know how Bog feels.
Anyway, what I woke up with was a character who turned out to be quite insubstantial until I wrote him - I really only had a vague mental image of him and an age (17.) I didn't even realize he was black until about page 40. (it's not a huge Thing in the book, just a detail) - and a sense of the society, the Inside city and the one Outside the Wall. The rest I had to come up with the old fashioned way, by staring off into space and sweating over the page.
Mostly, I get an idea of the "What If ..." sort and see where it goes. If it keeps going, it's a book. If not, I file it away for possible use in something else as background or plot facet/angle. Ideas are precious, you never know when you'll need one.
Sometimes a quote will set one off - the new book, Schadenfreude, Inc., got its start when I read someone saying of one of our Earthly atrocities - Syrian snipers targeting schoolchildren waiting for the bus, I believe - "This is why the other intelligent species of the universe have not contacted us."
"What if it was precisely why they contacted us, because we were the only known species where such horrors occur?" And that was enough to cause about 50 pages of notes, research, stuff compiled while I was writing Sugar.
Mob Rule came from an observation while I was working at a daily newspaper, that the only real difference between the Govt. and the Mob was that Those in Charge hadn't gotten around to running whores, yet. They were already in the gambling (lotteries) and drugs (tobacco, alcohol, marijuana eventually) businesses and like the Mob they showed scant regard for the law, disregarding whichever ones they found annoying or inconvenient.
It was a hop, skip, and small extrapolation to a world where the Depression saw a Second Revolution, this one more kin to the Reign of Terror, with politicians, lawyers, and other authorities swinging from the lampposts. In the anarchy that followed, the only group organized enough to take control and establish order was ... Organized Crime. That led to Moliere's statement that “If Satan should ever replace God he would find it necessary to assume the attributes of Divinity” and 351 pages and 100,000 words later, I was done.
Yes, it was just that easy .....
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