Author Bio:
Allan Emerson is a Canadian writer who was born in Saskatchewan and brought up in small towns there and in British Columbia. He lived in Australia and New Zealand before settling on the west coast of Canada, where he writes stories set in an imaginary small town which is quite real to him.
What inspires you to write?
Usually, I begin with an image that pops into my head where something common is combined with something odd. For example, my novel Death of a Bride and Groom, began with the idea of a giant wedding cake parade float. Then I started picturing life-size bride and groom figures atop the float, and wondered what would happen if the figures were replaced with real people. Where it got odd was when I imagined the real people were murder victims. And from there, I invented a town where such things could happen.
Tell us about your writing process.
I’d love to be an outliner. It would require much less re-writing if I knew exactly how the story would develop. However, try as I might, outlining doesn’t work for me. I have a general idea of the story line, but characters do things I don’t expect, or do them for reasons I don’t learn until I’m at the point in the story where they’re doing them. This has its advantages–it can be exciting to find there’s an unexpected twist in the tale and can lead to richer plots or more interesting characters.
I do create sketches of each character’s background, appearance, and personality, and how they’re connected with the other characters. Very little of this appears in the story, but it keeps me from having characters do something that wouldn’t fit with the way I’ve been depicting them.
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
I don’t talk to them, nor do they talk to me (unless it’s very late at night, and even then I’ve usually just forgotten to turn the radio off). However, I can see them in my imagination, and I watch them very intently. I know everything about them: their desires, their beliefs, their appearance, even their facial expressions when they speak.
Who are your favorite authors?
Any of the Inspector Rebus books by Ian Rankin will keep me reading late at night. I just finished the most recent in the series Even Dogs in the Wild. Rankin has let his characters age in real time and experience the battering that most of us take as we negotiate life, which makes them compellingly human. I liked Erik Therme’s book Mortom for the intriguing puzzle his protagonist has to solve. Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series, set in a Quebec village which is not on any maps, and where cell phones don’t work, is beautifully written with appealing characters.
How did you decide how to publish your books?
Given that I still don’t know what most of the buttons on my camera are for, and storing numbers in my phone is a hit-or-miss proposition, there was never any real chance that I’d master the skills required to self-publish. Also, once I’ve written the story, I want to hand it to someone else who knows how to magic it from manuscript to professional-appearing book in a reader’s hands.
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
I think it’s a wild frontier right now, and will continue that way for some time. I believe more authors will gravitate to self-publishing as time goes by, but the traditional model will continue to exist. There’s no escaping the fact that publishing houses have the expertise and the contacts to market a book much more successfully than most authors. Most writers I know don’t enjoy the promotional aspect of writing: if we had the extroverted personality which selling requires, we’d probably be actors instead of writers.
What genres do you write?
Mystery
What formats are your books in?
eBook, Print
Website(s)
Allan J. Emerson Home Page Link
Link To Allan J. Emerson Page On Amazon
