Joining LitPick today for Six Minutes with an Author is Stephen S. Power! Stephen has written short fiction and poetry, and is the author of The Dragon Round. Stephen is a senior editor at Amacom, where he handles such subjects as leadership, management, HR, entrepreneurship, and general business.

How did you get started writing?

I started seriously considering writing when I was a sophomore in high school (Clarkstown North in New City, NY). On my mother's old manual typewriter in my father's home office, I banged out a horror story called, well, the title was a string of letters unpronounceable except by Old Ones. I sent it to my school magazine, which took it, then the editor-in-chief, Karen Nickel, asked me if I'd like to join the staff. I said yes, eventually becoming editor-in-chief myself. Her call thus led to both a lifetime of writing and, as a bonus, a 20+ year career as a book editor.

Who influenced you?

Another person in high school who influenced me was my AP English teacher, Mrs. Scalera. I showed her a story I wrote, and she said, while it wasn't good, it did have one image she liked: "the ice locked in the ground." "That," she said, "is art." Now I know what to do, I thought.

In terms of authors, I have to actively avoid writing like Jack Vance. I find Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing and Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling invaluable.

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

I could easily spend an hour on this, breaking each topic down into different areas, then providing lists according to various circumstances, so let me instead give you my five favorite moments in books:

(5) In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Snape's memory, followed very closely by Harry going to meet Voldemort surrounded by the ghosts of those he loves, followed very closely by the bank heist.

(4) The bar fight in Cloud Atlas. High drama.

(3) In Lucky Jim, the last paragraph of chapter five, on dealing with bedspins, and the opening paragraph of chapter six, on waking up hungover.

(2) The Flutic episode of Cugel's Saga, which offered me a valuable life lessons: If you're in a hole and you have a chance to climb out, stop digging, but if you have no chance of getting out, you might as well dig as deep as you can and enjoy yourself.

(1) THE ENTIRETY OF A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY. And the Foundation Trilogy. And Slaughterhouse-Five. And The Sun Also Rises. And anything by Steinbeck. Or John McPhee.

And, yes, I am embarrassed that of the more than ten books/authors mentioned in that list, only one is a woman and all are white. Saying that I devoured the first five books of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series in a month and that the last third of Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem blew my mind more than any other SF novel, doesn't really make up for it.

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

Hemingway wrote, "Read everything so you know what you have to beat." This is true on so many levels. In particular, read as widely as possible. I try to alternate nonfiction with fiction and vary topics.

If a book doesn't interest you after 50-100 pages, don't put it down. Analyze why you want to put it down, figure out what the author could have done better, then put the book down. Similarly, if you find yourself reading something late into the night, ask yourself what techniques the author is using, from sentence structure to paragraph length to chapter arcs. What about the characters and situations? Would you have reacted the same way under different circumstances or if you were a different person? Every book on writing tells authors to use a notebook to record ideas. I think they should be recording techniques and model passages for use later as well.

Note, the same is true for stories, articles, podcasts, TV shows, etc.

Most of all, if you're young, don't worry about publishing. Just write as much as you can, take chances and try everything, such as rewriting stories you like, say, from a different point of view or in a different tense. If the publishing bug still nips at you, put your stuff up on Wattpad and see what people think, and tell others what you think of their stuff too. You'll learn as much about writing from critiquing others as you will from their critiques of your stuff, because critiquing forces you to lift the hood of the material and see how the engine and other systems make it go.

Where is your favorite place to write?

Each morning I write on my phone while taking the train to the city. I can't write a lot, and often I just revise what I wrote the night before, but that gets the back of my mind working for the rest of the day until I can write again at night.

What else would you like to tell us?

Don't just write stories. For instance, poetry taught me concision and the importance of a single perfect image. Screenplays, which I wrote as an exercise, taught me about dialogue and saying everything while actually saying very little and describing even less.

Have fun. If you're bored with what you're writing, your reader probably will be too.

Finally, two basic pieces of advice. One, give five times more credit than you take. Two, you'll be amazed how far you can get with only a "please" and a "thank you." And it's never too late for a thank you. After I wrote my answer to #1, I found Karen on Twitter and thanked her basically for, essentially, my whole life.

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Stephen, thank you for joining LitPick for six minutes! We love the story about how you got started writing, and that you were able to find Karen and thank her!