Ask the Author: Claudia Casper
Answered Questions (5)
Claudia Casper
Thank you Kim. I am thrilled. @Norwescon, among the Steampunkers, and other costumed folk, The Mercy Journals found its home.
Claudia Casper
For me the best thing about being a writer is getting to go deep on a subject, getting to explore it in the wide open fields of fiction. I thrill at honing in on the truth and the dramatic core of a story, at creating its shape, at tuning the way the reader will receive the story. It's like, I imagine, conducting a symphony in words.
Claudia Casper
There are at least two answers to this question. I read an article a few years ago about Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian General that headed up the UN peacekeeping mission to Rwanda at the time of the genocide, being found drunk and suicidal on a park bench in Hull, Quebec. I found his response to the atrocity searingly human and his story immediately elicited empathy and a feeling of kinship. I knew I wanted to write a story in the voice of a decent man haunted by memories of an atrocity. My character in The Mercy Journals, Allen (Mercy) Quincy, is much lower ranking than Dallaire, has his world view turned more completely upside down and is more complicit in the horror. The second origin for this book lies with my family history. My father was fourteen when World War II ended. His father was a general in the German army, his parents divorced during the war and his mother ran off with a doctor, leaving my father to be cared for my his grandmother and great aunt. After the war, his mother told him that she was Jewish. I grew up conscious of having a foot in both sides of that conflict, perpetrator and victim; that had a significant effect on my psyche. In The Mercy Journals, I wanted to approach murder and genocide with the assumption that we all, as humans, have some complicity. I believe that's the only way we can hope to reduce killing in the future. The third origin, is climate change, and a desire to transmit hope to the next generation, many of whom feel great apprehension and despair.
Claudia Casper
Rewrite as many times as necessary. Don't be daunted by the impossibly flawed nature of your first draft, should that be the case. In my experience, most of writing inhabits the heady territory of rewriting. Give your manuscript to chosen readers, but be specific about what you need to learn from them. Steer away from I liked it, I didn't like it responses and ask questions like: Where did your interest flag? What do you think motivated such and such a character to act? Were you confused?
Claudia Casper
I never experience writer's block per se. If I am finding resistance in the writing, I get a separate pad of paper and write out what the problems are. I ask myself questions, and then answer them. In my experience writer's block is the avoidance of articulating the question you need to ask about the problem, or avoiding answering it. Hoping someone else will solve it, so human, sadly will never dislodge the log jam. The author is the only person who can decide.
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