Author Interview – Daniel Black

Do you recall how your interest in writing originated? Vividly, when I was going to elementary school, they discovered I had a learning disorder, which was later classified as Autism. They also discovered I had a rather higher than normal IQ. So they sent me to a special school on Pearl Harbor called Assets.

At Assets, I met Mrs. Chuck Lee, a school teacher. As a class assignment she had everyone in the class write a short story, just four pages, but even so short a paper was torture for me. You see, part of my learning disability was that small motions caused sharp pains in me, so writing, literally, hurt. However, as soon as my pen touched the page, and I began writing the story, my imagination jumped up and took over, before I was done I had written a sixteen page story instead of the four page story originally assigned, and from that day on, I was a writer.

What inspires you to write and why? A lot of things inspire me to write. But mostly it’s just a matter of, I have to write. I am a writer, because I am a writer.

If I don’t write I start to suffer from depression, I don’t eat properly, I get snappish. So, I write to be a better person than I am without writing, the fact that some people enjoy reading what I write is just a bonus.

What genre are you most comfortable writing? Fantasy, in fantasy you are telling a story about people, nothing else is fixed in fantasy, I could say the sky was purple and the grass was orange with green polka dots and it would still be valid as fantasy, but people, make a character who doesn’t resonate with someone… then it would seem unreal.

What do you consider to be the most challenging thing about writing a novel, or writing in general? Forcing yourself to sit down in front of a machine and write within the confines of the story you have already started. For every one novel I have finished, I have a hundred story ideas that came to me during the writing of that novel that had to be shelved. Some eventually make it into other books, but for most it is the obscurity of a file named, “Archive.”

Did writing this book teach you anything, and what was it? I should hope so, and a great many things. It would be a sad sad experience that taught you nothing. Most of all the story tough me that when the writing feels right, you experience what your character experiences, you feel their torment, tears flow down your cheeks as your fingers click on the keyboard, and you laugh at their jokes. Characters in a novel come from you, and they are a part of you, but they are also individuals with their own wants and dreams, and lives, and it hurts when things go badly for them.