Ask the Author: Eaton Hamilton
Answered Questions (7)
Eaton Hamilton
Anne McCaffrey's Pern, where I would hope to imprint a dragon.
Eaton Hamilton
Struggling along with two novels.
Eaton Hamilton
“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Collected Dorothy Parker
“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Collected Dorothy Parker
Eaton Hamilton
I don't wait for inspiration. I just write.
Eaton Hamilton
I am expanding a story called "The Lost Boy," which won the 2003 CBC Literary Award, into a novel. The genesis for the original take was a story my aunt-by-marriage told me about her childhood in the Japanese internment camp during the second world war. But around then, too, I had toured the internment museum in New Denver, and, also coincidentally, my mother had just died. Mothers and daughters were very much on my mind. I was able to reach back to the pure origins of a girl's love for her mother (in this story's case, not a reciprocal love). Once these three things came together, so did the story.
Eaton Hamilton
Those of us who are writers have been delivered a care package, and when we unwrap it, there are 26 letters. "See what you can do with these," a note says. That's the fun of it--how to tangle and untangle and spin and loop and allude with such a limited (and expansive) tool kit.
And that we work independently.
And that we work independently.
Eaton Hamilton
After writing for many years and often suffering with writer's block, I took a long break (8 years) and when I came back to it, I no longer had the problem. I'm not certain why. I know that because I write across genres (memoir, short fiction, novel, poetry) it means that when one genre is being tough to crack, I can switch to another.
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