Bill Hoyt is the author of Good Hater and, most recently, The Monster Maiden of Westering Slough (Tales of the Red Brethren).
He took the time to share some of what he's learned about the
importance of indie publishing, the fantasy genre, and how writers can
start to improve their craft.
Your
most recent book features a young girl who was brutally scarred by a
fire. What was the inspiration behind this book? How difficult was it to
capture the essence of her character?
Many
writers believe that a story should be about who hurts the most. So for
the Monster Maiden of Westering Slough I started with a generic
character and gave her some real pain, just to see how she reacted to
it. But during that process, I recalled the number of times I've been
absolutely astonished at how well young people seem to handle
unfathomable setbacks or tremendous pain. We've all seen the kid who is
dying of bone cancer at 15 and thought, where does she find the strength
to deal with that? In those cases, it's often those around who suffer
most. The kid is dying – and knows it – but it's a parent who cries
herself to sleep every night. My character reacted sort of like that.
So I made her father suffer even more by making him responsible for her
being burned. After all, he raised the dragon that did it. She has
forgiven him, but he still feels guilty.
In
the end, she's a talented girl who has a good sense of fairness and a
bit of a temper and who is understandably hurt and frustrated by people
who abuse her. But her father is a scarred man who doesn’t always do the
wise thing when it might provide a shortcut to restoring his daughter's
face, and thereby relieving the guilt he carries. So the story in the
end became more about him, because he was the one who had the pain.
What is your favorite genre to read? Do you find yourself leaning toward this genre in your own writing?
After
history, without a doubt my favorite genre is fantasy, both to read and
to write. But I'll admit to being very opinionated about what makes up
that genre. I enjoy Tolkien and LeGuin and Feist and Saberhagen; good
stories featuring magical swords and wizards and dragons are, to me,
fantasy. An erotic novel in which one of the characters just happens to
be a mermaid is not. A romance novel about menopausal werewolves that
could be told just as well without werewolves is not. So I tend to skip a
lot of modern fantasy. You cannot read everything, and it makes little
sense to read what holds no appeal to you. Unless, of course, you're
reading it in order to improve your own writing in some way. That’s
always a good idea. But then it's work and not play.
What advice would you offer to new writers who want to break into indie publishing?
Indie is an immediate way to share your expertise, to tell your story, to make some money.
I
also believe that it is the future of publishing. The current book
publishing model, with its corporate publishers and distribution
channels designed to move physical books, is being broken upon the wheel
of technology. Those who are publishing indie and electronically today
(and learning the necessary companion skills, like self-marketing) are
building the next model. It will likely be one in which the phrase
“published author” is redundant or perhaps even meaningless – what is a
“published author” in a world without corporate publishers? So I would
say that if you think others will enjoy your work, publish it yourself.
Everyone will soon be doing it.
But
we also need to be honest with ourselves about why we want to go indie,
because if we’re not, we’re liable to get hurt or embittered very
quickly. What I mean by that is that there are a lot of authors who
believe they have written the Great American Novel. They are certain
that it’s not published only because every editor they have sent it to
is an incompetent jerk. But readers of that book are quite likely to
agree with the editors and have no qualms about saying so. Seeing your
beloved work mauled in public is far more painful than reading a
rejection on crème-colored cotton paper with nice letterhead in the
privacy of your own home; at least there you can burn the letter. So if
a person is going indie to avoid the pain of rejection by professional
editors, they would be well served to learn the craft better first.
Learning to write well is hard work. Indie publishing does not relieve
authors of the responsibility to do that work.
You're
also a blogger and have been for some time. Have you found that
regularly writing in your blog has improved your skills as an author?
Without
a doubt. Blogging forces you to capture the essence of a story in only a
few paragraphs. It's almost like writing a micro-story. I have found
that practice to be especially helpful for writing history, in which I
need to form small stories into the building blocks that will make up a
bigger one, whether I’m writing a biography or the story of a railroad
strike.
Even
though I found it most useful for non-fiction, it cannot hurt a fiction
author to have one more outlet for writing. It is the practice, not the
end use, which helps us the most. Just don't give your best ideas away
to strangers for free.
Would you recommend that new writers take advantage of social media sites to promote their books, or are these sites overrated?
Yes
and yes. I do think that Twitter and Facebook and the like are
overrated. Unless you already have a million followers, you're not
likely to send out a tweet that brings a thousand readers to your new
book. But I think you need to be in those places anyway. New writers
should make themselves available to their readers, and social media is a
great way to do that. Maybe when you're selling like Dean Koontz you
won't have the time to interact with those who read your books. But for
now, access to you is a service you can provide your readers for very
little cost. Any way you can keep them thinking about you and your
books is going to benefit you in the long run.
Read more about Bill and his current books at El Borak's Myopia or Facebook.
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