Ask the Author: Lyle Skains
Answered Questions (9)
Lyle Skains
Ah, you specified book world. I guess the Holodeck on the Enterprise is out, then, is it? (Technically, there are Star Trek books, but in the spirit of the question...)
If I'm being purely selfish, I'd have to go with the universe Iain Banks created in his Culture novels. Anything you want, leisure time, new body, different body, new house, whatever - it's yours, thanks to some nice utopian machines. I could do with that right about now!
If I'm being purely selfish, I'd have to go with the universe Iain Banks created in his Culture novels. Anything you want, leisure time, new body, different body, new house, whatever - it's yours, thanks to some nice utopian machines. I could do with that right about now!
Lyle Skains
Currently reading Naomi Alderman's The Power (quite good - I recommend it!). I'll be reading the Blue Pencils fiction anthology that several of my writing students have edited and published, as well as the SCSM Media Medley anthology of my writing students' work.
I just finished All Our Wrong Todays by Elai Mastei, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
On my to-read list is Caliban's War in James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, Super Extra Grande by Yoss and Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology. I've also got a stack of books at home that I'll probably try to work through!
I just finished All Our Wrong Todays by Elai Mastei, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
On my to-read list is Caliban's War in James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, Super Extra Grande by Yoss and Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology. I've also got a stack of books at home that I'll probably try to work through!
Lyle Skains
Augustus McRae and Woodrow Call, from McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. They epitomize friendship, loyalty, and basic humanity, despite vastly different characters. No marriage could have ever compared to these two men's strange and unspoken dedication to one another.
Lyle Skains
I don't. It's a myth.
Writers get "blocked" for one of two reasons: the struggle for "originality", and not knowing where their story is going. If the former, forget it. Nothing's original anymore; the cool thing is, no one actually cares. We just like good stories, no matter how many times we re-hash them. So go ahead, write that same old fairy tale again. If it was good enough for Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling, it's good enough for you.
If you don't know where your story is going, you didn't do your homework - you don't know enough about your character or storyworld to keep it rolling. Step back, ask the basic questions (what do the characters want? what stands in their way? how do they act to resolve the conflict?), and things become much clearer.
Writers get "blocked" for one of two reasons: the struggle for "originality", and not knowing where their story is going. If the former, forget it. Nothing's original anymore; the cool thing is, no one actually cares. We just like good stories, no matter how many times we re-hash them. So go ahead, write that same old fairy tale again. If it was good enough for Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling, it's good enough for you.
If you don't know where your story is going, you didn't do your homework - you don't know enough about your character or storyworld to keep it rolling. Step back, ask the basic questions (what do the characters want? what stands in their way? how do they act to resolve the conflict?), and things become much clearer.
Lyle Skains
Wearing pajamas to work.
Lyle Skains
Read. Read outside your comfort zone. Read poetry and journalism and fiction and the subtitles on films (a great way to get a feel for dialogue!).
Write fan fiction. Why not? It's a form of mimicry, which is how many writers get started. The cool thing about fan fiction, though, unlike "n00b" writing stuff, is that there's a huge fan fic community, and they're okay with lots of different writing styles, and trying new things. You can get some good feedback there, and develop as a writer who can connect with an audience.
Write fan fiction. Why not? It's a form of mimicry, which is how many writers get started. The cool thing about fan fiction, though, unlike "n00b" writing stuff, is that there's a huge fan fic community, and they're okay with lots of different writing styles, and trying new things. You can get some good feedback there, and develop as a writer who can connect with an audience.
Lyle Skains
I'm currently working on an experimental format: hyperfiction in e-Book form. I've been a prose writer all my life, but in my research I'm really interested in how digital media affect storytelling. Plenty of other writers and artists have created these amazing digital stories on many different online platforms, but they're so disparate and far-ranging that not many people are familiar with them. I rather shamelessly want to sell stories (while still being "writerly"), so for both the sake of creative experimentation and the sake of my research, I'm trying out just a teensy bit of digital experimentation by using hyperlinks in e-Books.
The current project is to publish several short stories, or "hyperfictions", to try it out, and then move on to a full-length novel. I want to see how people react, and whether it's a viable genre of narrative from both the writer's perspective and the audience's viewpoint.
The current project is to publish several short stories, or "hyperfictions", to try it out, and then move on to a full-length novel. I want to see how people react, and whether it's a viable genre of narrative from both the writer's perspective and the audience's viewpoint.
Lyle Skains
Two words: "what if?"
Lyle Skains
For the book I'm working on now, I was inspired by history. So much of the way the world is now hinges on single pivotal moments that could have gone another way - Archduke Ferdinand's assassination, D-Day's timeline, viral epidemic outbreaks...I'm having fun exploring what sort of changes "counterfactual" histories would have on a single character across different timelines.
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