SIX MINUTES WITH MARY PATTERSON THORNBURG:

Joining LitPick today for Six Minutes with an Author is Mary Patterson Thornburg! Mary is the author of The Kura, A Glimmer of Guile, the novellas Ghosts, which will be released in October, and The Boy-Wolf, and the short story “Darkness and Light.” The novella, Battle Royal, will be released early next year.

How did you get started writing?

When I was a high school senior, I wrote a paper for my English teacher explaining that I was going to be a fiction writer when I grew up. After that I wrote probably ten whole pages of fiction in my entire life, and those pages were for two creative-writing classes I took (I handed in the same story twice, sigh). I did write around twelve million words of other things, like college essays, term papers, letters, little notes of instruction on my students' papers, etc. I did write a few poems. But fiction? Never another page until I stopped teaching and took a deep breath. Then I had a dream (really!) that I wanted to turn into a story, so I wrote it. And then another. And then another… So I guess I wasn't lying when I wrote that senior English paper. Maybe it just took me all those years to grow up?

Who influenced you?

Too many people to list: writers, teachers, and friends. But especially writers of science fiction and fantasy who made me realize that true things about the world and time we live in can be expressed in fictional things about imaginary worlds. One of my teachers, Harry Taylor, said that all good fiction writers write about "what it's like to be alive" – and of course that's different for everyone. The writer who's been my biggest influence, I think, is Ursula K. Le Guin. Her stories and novels are mostly set on other worlds in other universes, but they're all about people and problems, joys and sorrows, as real as what's going on across the street this minute. And if I could write half as well as she does, I'd be a happy woman.

Do you have a favorite book/subject/character/setting?

Oh, dozens and dozens of favorite books, characters, and settings. Subjects, too, although since I'm a romantic at heart I most enjoy a story if it includes a love relationship (or two or three or more…), and that means any and all of the mysterious kinds of love that exist between and among individuals. Love, happy or sad or tragic, is what glues all of us Earthlings together. On the other hand, maybe I'm being too narrow here. I like stories that make me think, but even more I want a story to grab my emotions, make me cry or laugh (or both), make me believe in the characters and care about what happens to them.

What advice do you have for someone who wants to be an author?

Learn your craft, everything from how sentences go together to how a story is shaped. Read a lot, and read well-written stories or poems or whatever it is you want to write. Read the classics – there's a reason they got to be classics. Notice how good writers write sentences and paragraphs. Practice, practice, practice. Writing is a skill that has to be developed, just like any other skill, and it takes work. If you don't want to work at it, you don't really want to write; you just want to have people think you're a writer. Learn to take criticism and rejection, because you'll get a lot of that. Learn how to tell the difference between criticism that you can learn from and bad criticism that you can shake off. Then go for it and don't give up!

Where is your favorite place to write?

Right here in my incredibly messy and disorganized little office. And, sometimes, at the kitchen table, late at night, scribbling stuff by hand on whatever paper is handy that I'll have a hard time reading in the morning.

What else would you like to tell us?

Keep reading! Live for a while in the stories you like, and try all kinds of stories. You never know what new worlds you might discover.

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Mary, thank you for spending six minutes with LitPick! Congratulations on all of your books, short stores and novellas!