Posts Tagged ‘interviews’

Nebula Awards 2010 Interview: Paul Park

If I were purposely writing stories to attract a broad audience, I’d be depressed to think what a hash I’d made of it–it’s true my work isn’t easy to categorize, and that even within science fiction and fantasy I’m kind of a specialty taste.

Nebula Awards 2010 Interview: M.K. Hobson

I find that’s the hardest thing about writing historical novels–getting the little stuff right. There’s plenty of information about the battles, the wars, the huge political movements. But just try to find out exactly what the inside of the county clerk’s office in Sacramento in 1910 looked like!

Nebula Awards 2010 Interview: N.K. Jemisin

I usually write a detailed outline of maybe 15-20 pages, including character profiles and brief worldbuilding notes. Sometimes I start a wiki — I’ve done that with the Inheritance Trilogy, so I can easily look up concepts or made-up words I’ve forgotten from book 1 to book 3.

Nebula Awards 2010 Interview: Nnedi Okorafor

My characters always come first. You can’t have a plot if you don’t know who is going to move through it. Onyesonwu came to me way before her story did. The first scene I wrote was the first scene of the novel. No outline, no nothing. Just Onyesonwu at her father’s burial and some madness happens.

Nebula Awards 2009 Interview: Jeff VanderMeer

With regard to Finch, I think a lot of readers who thought I did more leisurely-paced fiction were surprised (although they shouldn’t have been) that I could write what amounts to a thriller-noir-spy story mixed with elements of visionary fantasy.

Nebula Awards Interview: Eugie Foster by Charles Tan

I’ve never been inclined to play the “what genre is it?” game or to take part in the oftentimes bloodier “that’s not such-and-such genre!” debates. Genre lines are so arbitrary and, in many regards, subjective. Like, to me, horror is more contemporary in setting, mood, and character than dark fantasy, but at the same time, urban fantasies are essentially defined by their modern settings, and they tend to be quite dark, yet I don’t consider them horror.

Nebula Awards Interview: Christopher Barzak by Charles Tan

A teenager is inherently an outsider, because they’re in transition, unformed, changing quickly from childhood to adulthood. They’ve been given a lot of cultural freedom as a child, because they are children. You often hear people say, “They don’t understand, they’re just children,” and this is often an excuse for breaking some minor cultural prohibition.