Ask the Author: Douglas Thompson

“Ask me a question.” Douglas Thompson

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Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Douglas Thompson It may never get published. I lived it and it nearly killed me. Fantasy is easy compared to writing about real life. To describe real life usefully, we must re-imagine it as fantasy, which is no mean feat. Always remember your subject is real life as we live it and experience it, here and now. That's always the answer, no matter what complex media and filters you choose to create the lens of your work. It's always about life, or it has no value at all. Everyone thinks they know ordinary life every day, but no one does, because no one can see what is so forcefully in front of us. Everyone is blindfold. The writer knows how to take that blindfold off for a second.

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How do you get inspired to write?

Douglas Thompson After many years of being creative, this becomes a non-question. You might as well ask how you get hungry or acquire the periodic need to urinate. As spiritual vessels, we each accumulate pain which must be released intermittently. As humans, our individuality is fundamentally unbearable and can only be relieved by reaching out to others by some means, of which creative writing is one.

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What are you currently working on?

Douglas Thompson As ever, giving up writing. Or maybe a book set entirely within a dream, because the subconscious is where we transcend reality and ourselves, almost find the truth, the key to everything.

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What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Douglas Thompson Write for yourself, don't try to sound like anyone else, and above all else never seek out commercial success. Find some editors or friends whose criticisms of your work can help you. But always remember that they are all partially wrong because of their own individual prejudices and backgrounds. Only by putting all the words of all your critics together with all your admirers, weighing them all up together, then symbolically discarding all of them, can you actually write.

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What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Douglas Thompson The incredible notion that my thoughts, my reflections upon this world, jotted down in one cafe or another, might actually be of interest to other people, sometimes to the extent of publication and some form of potential immortality. This makes life not just seem bearable, but even exciting and heroic, for a few moments at least. Everything is bearable, if we allow ourselves to view our lives as a story someone else might read.

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