Ask the Author: Michael Strelow
Answered Questions (6)
Michael Strelow
Go write someplace else. A coffee shop. I have a funky restaurant I sometimes go to in the afternoons and the waitress brings me iced tea all afternoon and keeps my glass full. Words begin to flow.
And second tip: if you usually type (computer) then hand write, change chairs, give your bottom a change of scenery and words will come. And don't be too particular about what comes. Say "yes" to whatever comes and the flow will start again.
And second tip: if you usually type (computer) then hand write, change chairs, give your bottom a change of scenery and words will come. And don't be too particular about what comes. Say "yes" to whatever comes and the flow will start again.
Michael Strelow
When everything is coming along in the writing--the words, ideas, images, etc.--and you are constantly surprising yourself by what comes next. Without having written what you just did, you would never have arrived at the place you are in the narrative, the place that just surprised the hell out of you. Where'd that come from? You might ask yourself, and then smile.
Michael Strelow
Make words daily. Accept even what you think of as bad (in one way or another) because the most important thing when you're beginning is the ACT of writing, not the writing itself. If your were a painter and throwing all your paintings away (or painting over them, better yet) until you began to like what you saw--that's it! Write like you'd lift weights or train for a long walk in the mountain. Keep doing it and trust that you'll get better and better. You will.
Michael Strelow
I have begun a new novel based on CRISPR technology or the new gene splicing techniques. I never know if it will all come together until I've written a few thousand words.
Michael Strelow
As I wrote about where the ideas come from, it can be articles or a news item or a friend's conversations (as with The Greening of Ben Brown). The next step is keep my butt in the chair each day and find out where the story goes.
Michael Strelow
The idea came from an article I read on artificial intelligence and another I read later on the HVM or the Hearing Voices Movement--i.e. people who hear voices non-pathologically or not schizophrenic etc. Many people, it turns out, hear voices of some kind, the most common of which is just hearing your name called. But many others hear more complicated voices. The HVM has a convention somewhere in the world every year. Those two articles melded together my interests in modernism (in art) and a new-found interest in the mathematics of fractals. And my other novels have also investigated the various layers of reality we all experience, how those layers arrange and rearrange what we call reality. Then I wrote the book as funny as I know how
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