Ask the Author: Robin Winter
Answered Questions (6)
Robin Winter
I don't write a story from the beginning. I write the important scenes, the ones I care about and add nothing else, unless my editors and agent tell me I need to do so. If you write a minimum of 500 words a day, even on Christmas, you certainly reduce the odds of ever suffering writer's block. Writing is a job, just like any of the arts and if you don't approach it professionally, with rigor and inventiveness, you'll get fired (by yourself….)
Robin Winter
The power to enter people's minds.
Robin Winter
Read, write, work with other authors, go to movies, the theater, listen to music, cook, have adventures and dearly love your friends. Participate in writers groups, write and submit short stories and long stories, take any piece of advice your work gets from more than one outside reader, very seriously. Read Shelly Lowenkopf's The Fiction Lover's Companion, Stephen KIng's On Writing, and Thomas McCormack's Fiction Editor's book. Then read some more, watch some more movies, and go to your writer's groups again.
Robin Winter
Part of the answer is in my first answer. Watch the Shadows is now out in ARCs. Think of a strong smart young woman in Southern California planning to become a scientist, who is faced by the odd gradual disappearance of the local homeless, and a sequence of strange events concerning ducks-- which mount to a personally threatening point. Call it science fiction with aliens for garnish.
Robin Winter
A surprising number of my ideas have their genesis in dreams. Future Past, for example, came from a dream in which I found myself in a strange man's head, experiencing the events of the story, hearing his very distinct, and certainly profoundly flawed personality and emotions as if I were only a breath distant from being him.
Robin Winter
I had a conversation by the fire one evening with my husband and daughter talking about the nature of horror and thriller structure, and what we all liked best in such novels. This book Watch the Shadows, is due out from the publisher in April, and I'll keep you all posted about its release.
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