Pull out your bingo card! An interview with LKH

[naeko.livejournal.com]

The Mother Of All Paranormal Fantasy: An Interview With Laurell K. Hamilton

It's by some guy named paulgoatallen, which gets my sycophant senses tingling, but I can't quite pinpoint why. He's probably popped up in the past as a hardcore fan, but my brain scrubs clean most things I learn after a few weeks. I don't want to pull apart the entire interview, but here are a few head-tilt moments that jumped out at me.

LKH: I also think the fact that I'm still having a blast writing the books shows.

Really? Because your twitter feed tells a different story.

LKH: I am certainly astonished that a type of book that I was told would never sell back in late 1980s/early 1990s has become the genre that, arguably, saved publishing in these rather dire times.

Her genre saved publishing! Wait. Were we in danger of losing the published word?

LKH: A novel is between four-hundred to eight-hundred pages in manuscript form. A movie script is about one-hundred-and-twenty pages, to one-hundred-and-sixty pages, so how to take 400 - 800 pages and winnow it down to only 120-160?

Maybe start by winnowing your books down to 120 pages? I mean, you could easily cut that much out and not lose any of the finer points. Also, I've never heard winnow used in this manner, so I'm a bit confused, but eh.

To top it off, the comments end (as of this writing) with someone claiming their favorite of all the book covers is the one for Hit List. I'm hoping they are not talking about the American cover /o\

Comments

[zombiegoat.livejournal.com]

I was more than a little appalled to find out that when she's writing, she doesn't discover what the plot is to her novel until she's 50-150 pages in. Aspiring writers, take note: this is *not* how you should approach things.

[queenofquails.livejournal.com]

Free-writing until you hit something you can work with is a great way to push through a creative block, but you then have to go back and figure out what's crap and what's usable. The problem here, I suspect, is that LKH doesn't cut anything. She seems to write with a mind that everything written in the leading-up-to-the-"plot" stages is staying.

She also seems to be under the impression that writing is solely about discovery, as if you're doing it wrong if you go in with a plot already laid out. While those moments of revelation can be really fun, it's by no means the only way or the "right" way to write.

[zombiegoat.livejournal.com]

Very true. It was also written into her last contract (and possibly others before that) that she had final editorial control over what appeared in print. Total control. If she didn't want something cut, it stayed. Having another pair of eyes on something is a really good way to avoid lengthy visits from the Exposition Fairy.