Author Interviews by Allison Symes

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos

When I started writing seriously many years ago, I read as many author interviews as possible. I still find them engaging and informative.
 
I love being on both sides of the questioning too as I sometimes appear on other writers’ blogs and regularly interview authors for an online magazine.

 

Inventing interesting questions to draw the author into conversation is a joy and challenge but this is where being a writer helps. I know what I would want to know and start my questioning from there.

 

I found it helpful years ago to work out how I would answer questions put to writers should the happy day come around when I became a published author. I found that paid because it helped me get used to the idea of talking about what I write. It does seem an odd thing to do when you start. How are you coming across? When you talk about your characters and stories, does it make sense to those listening?

Certain questions crop up for most writers. I always ask people I’m interviewing for the first time to share three writing tips and three marketing ones. No one writer can know all of these so I see it as increasing knowledge for everyone. 

Someone aiming to become a published writer or who is relatively new can take a look at what people have said here and start thinking about what marketing they will do and how. The writing tips can be applied directly to their work, of course.

I remain grateful for whoever said write first, edit later. It stopped me tying myself up in knots trying to write the perfect sentence. It was liberating to know it was fine for the first draft to be rubbish. I picked that tip up through something I’d read in an interview.

I use interview techniques on my characters. As I write a lot of flash fiction and short stories, I get through a lot of characters. (I don’t kill them all, honest!). I need to know before I start what intrigues me about them to make me want to write them up.  

Once I’ve got that, I know I can do something with them. Making my characters “answer” a few pertinent questions such as what do you want, what is getting in your way, and what are you prepared to do to achieve your aims gives me a basic outline. I then fill in the gaps. The answers also indicate to me the likely social background for my characters and their overall attitude. 

Sometimes I am asked how I come up with so many characters so it pays me to have an answer to that one good to go!

It’s also lovely to share links to interview I conduct or where I am the interviewee on my website etc. It makes for something different to read there. Maybe someone is reading the interviews I put up and using them to help with their writing plans. I hope so.