Ask the Author: Stephen Goldenberg
Answered Questions (12)
Stephen Goldenberg
Why, in his youth, my father’s nickname was Bunky. He died two years ago and neither my mother nor anybody else in the family seem to know.
Stephen Goldenberg
I'm sure I cleaned it all up yesterday but, when I went into the bathroom this morning, the floor was still covered in blood. Either I'm going mad or he's come back to haunt me.
Stephen Goldenberg
Dickens London. Like many people, my images of Victorian London come almost entirely from Dickens so I'd love to travel back to experience the luxury and the squalor.
Stephen Goldenberg
Of Human Bondage - Somerset Maugham
Everybody's Fool - Richard Russo
The Essex Sepent - Sarah Perry
Spitalfields - Dan Cruickshank
Jerry White's book on debtors' prisons.
Everybody's Fool - Richard Russo
The Essex Sepent - Sarah Perry
Spitalfields - Dan Cruickshank
Jerry White's book on debtors' prisons.
Stephen Goldenberg
Always so hard to answer these type of questions, especially when you've spent a lifetime reading as many novels as I have. So, I'll just go with the first couple that comes to mind. It's Macon Leary, the travel writer, and Muriel, the dog trainer, in Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist. I found their love story very moving and I loved the way Tyler manages to side stop some obvious cliches.
Stephen Goldenberg
Sorry - it doesn't exist anymore. I'm trying to set up a new one to better reflect on my own writing. I'll let you know when it's active.
Stephen Goldenberg
My novel 'The Lying Game' came about because I wanted to write something based on my experiences in my final teaching job before I was forced into early retirement.
I felt my experiences were symptomatic of so much that has been going on in society in general in recent years i.e. an atmosphere of bullying and harassment in which it becomes impossible to trust anything that people in authority say to you.
In the end, the novel is not about my own experiences at all but it creates the kind of atmosphere and the moral dilemmas that I and other people around me experienced.
I felt my experiences were symptomatic of so much that has been going on in society in general in recent years i.e. an atmosphere of bullying and harassment in which it becomes impossible to trust anything that people in authority say to you.
In the end, the novel is not about my own experiences at all but it creates the kind of atmosphere and the moral dilemmas that I and other people around me experienced.
Stephen Goldenberg
The great storymaker in the sky feeds me with wonderful ideas.
Stephen Goldenberg
A novel provisionally titled 'Car Wheels on a Gravel Road' set in London and South-West France. I live for part of the year in both places.
Stephen Goldenberg
There's no non-cliched answer to this. Just write because you enjoy it. Don't write because you think you're going to make a living out of it. If you write, then you're a writer whether anybody wants to publish you or not.
Stephen Goldenberg
I'm very lucky because I've never suffered from it. Mainly it's because I've never had to write to deadlines and so I take my time - on average my novels have taken me 2-3 years to complete.
I always find that, if I'm not sure where a story is going or how I'm going to end it, I just take a break or go back and do some rewriting and, by the time I come back to it, I have plenty of ideas.
I also find that, if I've created real living characters, they will often tel me where their story is going next or, sometimes, they tell me that my plans for where their story is going doesn't work for them.
I always find that, if I'm not sure where a story is going or how I'm going to end it, I just take a break or go back and do some rewriting and, by the time I come back to it, I have plenty of ideas.
I also find that, if I've created real living characters, they will often tel me where their story is going next or, sometimes, they tell me that my plans for where their story is going doesn't work for them.
Stephen Goldenberg
I've enjoyed stories all my life, whether telling, writing or reading them, but being able to entertain other people by telling gripping stories is so rewarding. As a male, I often feel (probably entirely wrongly), that the feeling of a novel slowly building up page by page (I write my first drafts longhand for this very reason) is the closest I can get to giving birth.
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