Ask the Author: Tony Stowers
Answered Questions (6)
Tony Stowers
The best thing is you have to be honest and the worst thing is you have to be honest. You can disguise yourself in characterisation but I don't do that much myself and instead tend to disguise my adventures!
Tony Stowers
Forget about it and go and off and do something else for a day, week or month. Always carry a pen and little piece of paper round with you and jot down anything that comes into your mind, just a keyword to jog your memory later on.
Tony Stowers
Don't give up. And don't copy what other people tell you that you should be doing. Bollocks to them. Do what you want. Writing a book is relatively easy. Selling a book is trickier. We live in a world where people need to be told or guided to what they feel is good for them.
Tony Stowers
The working title is "I am a child" and it's in first person infinitive and looking at my childhood in the 1960's and 1970's in my working class origins in North East England. People of my age and generation are living history.
Tony Stowers
Through my own life experiences mostly. I write every morning from just before dawn until about 8 or 9 am while my mind is empty and fresh and I just write as much as I can or the best that I can and when I get tired or lose interest, I stop and do something else. If you maintain that daily discipline, eventually you've got a couple of months of these notes and that's your book. Then you have to edit it all down and re-arrange it in an order that suits you, not in an order that so-called "professionals" tell you will sell. That's not art. Artists are supposed to set trends, not copy them.
Tony Stowers
"Five Years" was originally two shorter novels published separately but the themes and time periods were similar so it seemed better vfm (value for money) to sell them together under one overall title. Both are based on my own experiences of being in my mid-Twenties living in London in the 1980's. The temptation was strong to try and make something more of them, that is to invent stuff that never actually happened but I'm not good on bullshit so it was very much like Sam Beckett's "Murphy" - just tell it how it is or was and let people make up their own minds what they think.
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