The easiest question is usually the most complicated. A couple years ago I published my first novel, The Terror of Living, and as part of that process I gave several interviews. Interviews are always fun. The questions make you think, usually for the first time in a year, on the themes of your work, on where the characters came from, on the goals you were trying to achieve.

In summary, they help summarize the novel in a way. They pull back the curtain a bit and shine a light on the inner workings of novel writing. The gears and sprockets, the little springs that some times go flying into the air under all that stress. These are the types of questions you begin to expect as an author, and they are good questions. They are thoughtful, well meaning questions that fly like arrows toward the bull’s eye.

Of course they are not alone. Often interviewers temper some of these questions with a lead-in or conclusion to the interview, either winding up to the larger subjects of theme, voice, character, etc., or they help bring the interview to a close.

One question I have received quite a bit now that The Carrion Birds nears publication is whether I, as a writer, always wanted to be a writer. The quick answer (and the one I always gave in the past) has been to say that no, I wanted to be a marine biologist and it was only through electives during college that I discovered I had a talent for writing. This is the brush-off. This is the: let’s move onto the next question so I can get at the meat of theme and character and why exactly I did shoot those horses in my last novel, or make that one character so damned demented. →