Ask the Author: Ed Gibney
Answered Questions (4)
Ed Gibney
Not as the main focus, but politics will come up in future novels since it is so involved in the big decisions we have to make as a species and those are the questions I’m interested in talking about. Draining the Swamp was set entirely in the realm of government so I could talk in detail about political philosophy, but my next novel deals with the science fiction of a quest for immortality, which gives me a great way to talk about ethics and how to live an examined life. There is a character in that novel who’s a politician, since any life-extension technologies being considered would have such a huge impact on our political and economic spheres that it’s likely to become heavily regulated if it gets any closer to reality, but he’s just a minor character used to discuss those minor elements within the larger theme. This is the novel I’ve had in my head for over a decade that made me really need to try my hand as a writer so I’m super excited to get it down on paper and turned into a finished product as soon as I can. I hope you’ll check it out!
Ed Gibney
Well, I’ve always wanted to be a writer—I still have a copy of a short story I wrote when I was four about an unjust king who was overthrown by his people—but it took me until I was forty years old to build a life where I was actually able to write. I’m still an aspiring writer (and probably always will be), but the only reason I’m a writer at all is that I figured out a way to live a life where I can be the kind of writer I want to be—dedicated to it full time and able to invest energy into what I hope will turn out to be big, great, lasting books. You don’t go into writing to make money quickly, so you either have to have some already, have another source for it, or be able to live without it. I’ve solved this problem in my life by using a little from each of those three strategies. I’ve worked in two different careers where I earned over six figures per year and I invested that wisely and paid off all my debts. I’ve worked in remote Alaska and Ukraine for very little money and found that lives without much stuff in them could be much more interesting than normal American lives, and the lack of luxuries was actually easy to get used to. And probably best of all, I married a wonderful woman who now makes a decent living as a university professor and is supportive of me in my endeavor. These are the life choices that made my particular writing dreams come true, but my advice to aspiring writers in general is to aim high and have the courage and stamina to find your own paths, whatever they may be.
Ed Gibney
You know that feeling you get when you read a good book and the world it creates just envelopes you when you open the pages, and every so often you come across a new idea or phrase that makes you just stop dead to soak it in? Well, for me, those feelings and moments are incredibly magnified while I’m working on my own fiction and I’m continually surprised at the things my mind comes up with when it’s put into the right place at the right time. The length of the writing process means that these moments of reverie and discovery go on for months at a time too. That’s been the best addition to my life since becoming a writer, although hearing from readers, getting to raise a puppy at home, and having the freedom to work on exactly what I want to work on have all been fantastic parts of the writing life as well.
Ed Gibney
I’m still new enough to this that I haven’t faced the crippling writer’s block that seems to strike people who have written for a few years or more and find they have nothing left to say. I’m still plenty inspired to write and I have a file with lots of novel and short story ideas in it that I can hardly wait to get to someday. I’m still enough of a novice at this writing life though that I sometimes struggle to have energy or focus to fill a blank page, which is a different sort of writer’s block. That one I’ve dealt with by learning to manage and control the times that my emotions are most in tune for this kind of creative work, and then figuring out a daily schedule that works best for me. I definitely need to keep eating, sleeping, exercising, and socializing well to keep my moods stable and productive—no lonely alcoholism for me! As for getting going on putting words down, I find that if I try to write first drafts in whole, complete, grammatically correct sentences, my mind wanders off to think about all the tiny decisions I have to make about the scenes, and I struggle to get anything down at all. Instead, I find I’m much more in control when I spend an hour or two in the morning jotting down bullet points and key phrases for the section I’m working on, which I can easily juggle and move around as needed. Then, I can go back in the afternoon to flesh that out into finished text without having to worry about exactly where I’m going. These bullet points are at a much finer level of detail than the big outline I do for a piece of work before I start writing anything. That may sound tedious to some people, but it’s just the way my mind works best and I didn’t know that when I first started writing.
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