Ask the Author: J.D. Kaplan
Answered Questions (8)
J.D. Kaplan
Music. I listen to music all the time, usually as loud as I can tolerate while exercising, driving or just sitting on the couch. The ideas for what I write come to me during these times. It's a reaction to whatever emotion the music is carrying rather than the message that might be contained in it. Sometimes I envision a snippet of a scene while listening to a certain song. That song then becomes a regular part of my listening sessions until the scene fleshes out and a larger story comes to me.
J.D. Kaplan
I'm working on the third novel in my Dreamside Cycle, Splitter. It's getting ready to go out to my second round of readers, after which I hope to get a professional editor to do a comprehensive reading for me. I take a lot longer to finish a work than some authors.
J.D. Kaplan
I guess I most enjoy the sense of satisfaction I get from sharing stories with people. It feels like I'm giving a little bit of myself, connecting with people.
J.D. Kaplan
Reading did it. I started consuming fantasy and scifi novels at a young age, reading a couple a week, often at the expense of my studies. While my classmates and friends were idolizing sports heroes, musicians, and actors, my heroes were Stephen R. Donaldson, Frank Herbert, JRR Tolkien and Isaac Asimov. I wrote my first book at 12--a novella that was dreadful and shortly after finishing it I stuck it in the back of my closet and never saw it again. I still have this nightmare where my mother shows up at a book signing with it in hand and passes it around proudly while I try to hide behind a couch and think about a pseudonym that might allow me to keep writing. But I was dedicated to it. Actually finished it. Never stopped writing after that.
J.D. Kaplan
Music! My grandmother used to say that music was her religion and there's definitely something to that for me as well. It's not the lyrics but the emotions that music conjures that starts my creative process. The Scary Girls was born while I was listening to Veruca Salt, The Mars Volta and Nine Inch Nails. Waking Dreams came out of an odd mixture of Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead and Mahler's 1st Symphony.
My next book so far has been written entirely while listening to Zoë Keating and Brahms' Double Concerto. And perhaps a little The Pretty Reckless on the side.
Thank you so much for stopping by!
My next book so far has been written entirely while listening to Zoë Keating and Brahms' Double Concerto. And perhaps a little The Pretty Reckless on the side.
Thank you so much for stopping by!
J.D. Kaplan
All my ideas come to me from music. The idea of an all female band seemed incredibly powerful. I've always gravitated toward fiction with strong female characters and an all girl band seemed like an ideal place to find a group of strong females. From there I just let my imagination run free. But the kernel of the entire idea came while I was listening to an old Veruca Salt CD.
J.D. Kaplan
A couple of things. Writing, like any other discipline requires just that: discipline. Build a habit of writing regularly and often and stick with it as best you can. The other thing is that if you need to remember that if you are putting words to page you are already a writer. To me, "aspiring" means you're kind of thing that you might write someday. Start right now.
J.D. Kaplan
Writer's block, for me, is just not knowing what comes next. No matter how much planning I do, inevitably I reach a point where I'm not sure what comes next. So my solution for writer's block is to do simple writing exercises that might help me learn what comes next. Short character descriptions. 300 word snippets of some totally unrelated scene revolving around one or more of the characters I'm working on. Sometimes just putting it aside entirely and working on something completely unrelated gets things going again. But I work really hard not to take a break from writing *something*--writing, like any other discipline requires you to build a habit and stick with it.
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