The Page Turners discussion

Our next Q and A is with Scott Bergstrom, author of The Cruelty!



Here is the synopsis:
When her diplomat father is kidnapped and the U.S. Government is unable to help, 17 year-old Gwendolyn Bloom sets off across the sordid underbelly of Europe to rescue him. Following the only lead she has—the name of a Palestinian informer living in France—she plunges into a brutal world of arms smuggling and human trafficking. As she journeys from the slums of Paris, to the nightclubs of Berlin, to the heart of the most feared crime family in Prague, Gwendolyn discovers that to survive in this new world she must become every bit as cruel as the men she’s hunting.


Please post questions by March 16.

How did you begin writing?
Who inspires you to write the most?
Do you have any books in the works that you can tell us about?
Do you have any advice for those who wish to become writers?
What education did you receive?

Here are the answers:


How did you begin writing?

When I was in the 7th grade, I had an English teacher named Fred Marfell who asked each of his students to write an eight page short story. I was a terrible student, and groaned at the thought. A whole eight pages! But I did it, of course, and was hooked immediately. I got an “A” on the assignment—maybe the only “A” I’d ever gotten to that point. Fred and I stayed in contact over the years. He changed a lot of students’ lives for the better.

Who inspires you to write the most?

I’m fascinated by the real world. I grew up in the closing days of the Cold War and was captivated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the crumbling of the Soviet Union. To me, it wasn’t so much political as literary. You could feel the intrigue and human drama in the air. I write about the real world, particularly about its darker, lesser known corners, because it’s just as fascinating as anything dreamt up by authors of dystopian-future fiction. I want to tell those stories, the ones that don’t make the headlines, about what’s possible in this world.


Do you have any books in the works that you can tell us about?

Right now I’m deep in the process of writing the follow-up to The Cruelty. What we saw in the first book of this series was how Gwendolyn Bloom, my heroine, transformed herself from a timid, bullied teenager into the opposite of that—a tough, cunning warrior. The transformation for Gwendolyn was as much moral and psychological as it was physical. Unlike so many other literary good guys, Gwendolyn is often in the position of having to shoot first—something Katniss or Tris would never do. The second book finds Gwendolyn in a new city and a new country, but she has transformed once again into something even stronger than she was at the end of The Cruelty. What she does with this new-found strength really stretches the idea of heroism in new directions.

Do you have any advice for those who wish to become writers?

My friend Corrine said it best: if you’re not living in a constant state of nausea, you’re doing it wrong. The idea is that to write is to risk everything. You risk being called a fool. You risk failing miserably. The prospect of these things makes us sick to our stomach, but as writers we have to ignore it. We find our confidence somehow—or maybe we don’t, and push forward anyway. The point is, we put our work out there in the world and try to make it look easy.


What education did you receive?

I studied philosophy and political science in university, but soon afterward entered the world of advertising. Really, that was my real education in writing. In New York, on Madison Avenue, no one cares about your writer’s block. You have a deadline. It’s tomorrow. And you have to be in Washington or Nashville or Los Angeles at 10:00 a.m. to present it to the client, so come up with something brilliant or we’ll find someone who will.
Writing in that kind of pressure cooker teaches you to find creative efficiencies, to know right away whether an idea is good or not. It also teaches you the art of editing. You may have a great concept, but the art director is breathing down your neck to cut the word count by 80%. You’d be amazed how well you learn to trim the fat. Some of the copywriters I know can trim War and Peace down to the length of a single tweet.