Did your book require a lot of research?
The YA books, some, certainly – I did read up on the Anasazi, and certainly on Nikola Tesla, before I wrote about them. I even managed to snag a stay in Nikola Tesla’s room at the New Yorker Hotel, the room where he spent the last years of his life and where he in fact died. But these are, in the end, fantasy books, and much of it came out of my own imagination which requires no research to build castles in the air,
With some of my other books – The Secrets of Jin Shei and Embers of Heaven, my two “grown-up” novels, were both based in part on various historical incarnations of China, the former an Imperial China of the ancient past and the latter the China under the Cultural Revolution. Those books, particularly the second, required a great deal of research – I must have read more than 100 books, in total, to write these two. My current work in progress is another adult historical fantasy, and this too required copious research reading before I could start writing it. I am a stickler for detail, even if that detail must be woven into a wholly fantastical setting – I know what kind of thing makes my worlds SOUND real, and it takes a lot of good research to achieve that.
What type of writer are you—the one who experiences before writing, like Hemingway, or the one who mostly daydreams and fantasizes?
Well, I write mostly fantasy. If I experienced much of what I write I would be a very unique human being indeed…
Agatha Christie got her best ideas while eating green apples in the bathtub. Steven Spielberg says he gets his best ideas while driving on the highway. When do you get your best ideas and why do you think this is?
I often dream mine. Sometimes I serial-dream, simply picking up a dream where I left it off the previous night. But that is hardly the primary source of ideas.
For a writer, ideas are everywhere. Kudos to Christie and Spielberg for being able to nail down where and how they get theirs – but mine come at me from unexpected places and inconvenient times leaving me to scribble them down on bits of paper or try to remember a single shorthand phrase which will be a trigger for the thing to unfold into a full-blown idea which presents itself to be written about. I have very little control over this. I’ve been known to interrupt conversations to scurry off and grab my little notebook – without which I go nowhere – and scribble furiously as some new thought or wonderful story idea mugs me and won’t let go until it is at least recorded well enough to be recalled at a later stage when I’m actually at a keyboard and can do something about it.
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