Member Spotlight: Karen A Wyle

Why is writing important to you and why do you think it’s an important medium for the world? I suspect that some tens of thousands of years ago, one or more of my ancestors were tribal storytellers. Writing stories feels like what I’m meant to do, even born to do. As for why writing fiction matters, we need all the help we can get to push beyond our boundaries and understand each other better, and fiction helps us do that. It can carry what wisdom we manage to glean from one generation to the other. I believe it’s fundamental to buliding and maintaining civilization.

What are your tried and tested remedies to cure writer’s block? Until shortly before the recent demise of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I used that mechanism to power through my rough drafts. My process has loosened up somewhat in the last couple of years, but I still declare a starting time and expect myself to spend part of each ensuing day at the keyboard with my Scrivener project open. If I find that for several days running, I really don’t want to work on a particular project, I put it aside to see whether my interest revives. If not, it’s probably not the project I should be writing.

What is your favorite time to write? I don’t have a favorite time of day. I like to write for a while, then go off and do something else (often read), then come back and write a little more, all day long. More broadly, I’ve been conditioned by my years of doing NaNoWriMo to write a novel in the autumn.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received and would like to impart to other writers? The best advice I’ve heard is not to take any piece of advice as gospel! Authors need to find a process that works for them, no matter what process works for some other author — however respected or credentialed or opinionated. I’ll add an important corollary, courtesy of Chuck Wendig’s Gentle Writing Advice/How to Be a Writer Without Destroying Yourself: don’t assume that the process that worked for you last time, or the last ten times, is the one that will work for you forever. Be open to changing it up!

What excites you most about being a writer in today’s age? I’m grateful to be alive and writing at a time when I can do without gatekeepers! I can put my books out there where readers can find them, even if it’s sometimes difficult to help those readers discover them.

Karen A Wyle’s That the Dead May Rest is out now with ‎ Oblique Angles Press.