Ask the Author: Andrew Jonathan Fine

“Ask me a question.” Andrew Jonathan Fine

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Andrew Jonathan Fine Write what you know. What what you love to write. Write in your own natural storytelling format. NEVER think of writing for money.

For the longest time I was stuck trying to write with the standard 3rd person omniscient narrator formula of story telling, and quickly lost motivation after the first ten pages.

I contacted one of my mentors, Piers Anthony, for help. He suggested I write my chapters as ten pages long, as self-contained stories.

I then remembered an author, David Brin, whose Startide Rising and Heaven's Reach stories were written as short chapters in 1rst person. I followed that format, and soon found myself UNABLE to stop writing!

It wasn't hard to link more-or-less selt-contained stories with common themes, and that's how my first novel fell out.
Andrew Jonathan Fine Knowing that even if nobody outside your family might read your book, that there's still a piece of you surviving on a shelf somewhere. Writing a novel was something I did as part of my bucket list. I'm happy to have that behind me... I'm happier yet that my story has already touched some peoples' hearts and made some others think.
Andrew Jonathan Fine People write letters, emails, reports, advertisements, legal forms, and everything else. People already know how to write. They need to just learn the confidence to tell the story of their own lives in the way which seems most natural to them. It took me decades to build such confidence. Just go and live life in the meantime!
Andrew Jonathan Fine This year I moved Heaven and Earth to provide my wife with the one thing I felt would help make her life easier, some surgery to help her cope with some existing auto-immune and metabolic disorders. I'm helping her recover and I'm giving her cheerful encouragement.
Andrew Jonathan Fine I became an author mostly by accident. My wife Anna, bless her loving heart, allowed me to commit myself for clinical depression. There as I worked with people in therapy I made piles of notes regarding my life, and after returning home realized several common themes running through them, which if placed in the proper framework could possibly make a decent novel.
Andrew Jonathan Fine My ideas for my first and only book so far have been percolating in my mind for decades (I'm in my 50's now), based on everything I've ever read and from my life experiences. There's a little bit of everything in it, just like there's a little bit of everything in life.

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