Ask the Author: Greg Hickey
Answered Questions (12)
Greg Hickey
I'm not sure it has risen to the status of a mantra, but my goal is just to do a little bit every day. Write a little every day. Work on marketing a little every day. Over time, those little bits start to add up.
Greg Hickey
I would travel to J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. I love traveling in general, and I would want to see all the fantastical lands and creatures he imagined.
Greg Hickey
Right now, I'm on The Town, the second book of William Faulkner's Snopes trilogy. After that is a four-book glance at race in America with Bound for Canaan by Fergus M. Bordewich, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, and Ghettoside by Jill Leovy.
Greg Hickey
Well, I have a day job as a forensic scientist, so literally every mystery in my daily life could be part of a book.
Greg Hickey
Henry and Clare from Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. A writer who can pull off an unconventional love story, as Niffenegger does here or Charlie Kaufman does with the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has a great opportunity to explore relationships from a different angle and shed light on interpersonal dramas in ways we don't experience with cookie-cutter relationships. In this case, Niffenegger artfully employs time travel to examine our connections to our pasts, the way we choose our partners and our fears of passing time and death. Henry and Clare are complex and well-crafted characters, and seeing how their relationship ebbs and flows across shifts in time allows for beautiful moments of poignant nostalgia and foreshadowing throughout the novel.
Greg Hickey
Yes, definitely. What's the date?
Greg Hickey
Exploring new ideas
Greg Hickey
Usually by reading (books, newspapers, essays, anything). There are so many ideas out there with fascinating connections that no one has fully developed.
Greg Hickey
I try to outline as much as I can before I write, especially for sections I know will be difficult. If I know where I want to go before I start, eventually the details on how to get there will flesh themselves out.
Greg Hickey
Write! Write what you like and keep writing. If you're not very good at first, you will get better. Keep at it, be patient and have fun.
Greg Hickey
I’m currently editing a novel entitled The Friar’s Lantern. It’s a gamebook (a fancy word for choose-your-own-adventure story) that addresses various questions about free will and determinism. The story centers around a philosophy problem called Newcomb’s paradox and a murder trial in which you are a jury member.
Greg Hickey
In Our Dried Voices, the colonists of Pearl are based on the Eloi from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. In his novel, the Eloi are a future species that have evolved from humans and are basically innocent, mindless happy beings who live (mostly) blissfully ignorant lives. They are the result of what happens when people have no need to struggle for survival. I was fascinated by humankind’s rather paradoxical aim of exercising all our knowledge in order to make our lives easier and more automated, to the point where we no longer need to think or act.
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