Writer's Voices

We cannot control someone, what they do or what they think. We just need to try our best to walk on the righteous path ourselves. setting a good example.

This interview is chock full of nuggets for new and aspiring novelists, especially for those writing historical fiction. Kind of like what she calls “Easter Eggs” – historical facts that she uncovers during her research that can become a descriptive detail in her manuscript, or can completely change the story.

I had to trust that process – that the character was going to make a decision to lead me to the logical ending

Running through it all is the story off a boy who grew up steeped in religion, and became a man who loved science, and sees the good in both. If all scientists were as good at storytelling (i.e. conveying scientific principles in an accessible way) as David Parrish, I think we might see a lot less anti-science bias in our public discourse today,

The insight that really sticks with me is the idea that the scientific method can’t actually “prove” a definite cause for an observed phenomenon – it can eliminate hypotheses, or demonstrate that a hypothesis is true under the experimental circumstances, but that is never enough to prove that the matter is settled. True scientists know this, and in a strange way it makes me trust science more.

I call this book my love song to biology

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

Some books are to be tasted, others are to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested

With all that success, why did he switch to writing novels? “I was tired of being told what to do. I’m open to suggestions,” he explains, “just not to orders. That’s the difference between writing a novel and a screenplay.” He also appreciates the opportunity to write expansively, saying “Writing screenplays, you learn to be a minimalist. With novels, you’re a maximalist.”

Elias’ new novel “You Can Go Home Now” is a study in revenge and the reality of violence against women. A thriller written from the perspective of a female police detective, it is definitely a departure from his previous comedic writing!

In screenwriting, you’re taught to begin the scene after it begins, and get out of the scene before it ends.

There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness

A poem, according to me, is never finished. I read, and reread it, and let it sink in. At some point I think, ‘I really don’t know how I could do it any better,’ so that’s what it is right now.

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness

I have always been drawn to Spain, although I’ve only visited there twice, once the summer I graduated from high school, and again about 15 years ago. Reading “Finding Hemingway” and talking with author Ken Dortzbach was a treat, because I have memories (and stories to tell) of many of the location he visits in his debut romantic comedy “with a magical realism twist.”

Ken’s descriptions of the food (and the wine, and the cocktails) are delightful, and he told us he is trying to cook his way through the dishes described in “Finding Hemingway” albeit not always successfully. We also talk about why he chose to write from a female point of view, and what it’s really like to run with the bulls in Pamplona.

Writing a book is kind of like farming. It takes a long time for the book to be completed or the crops to grow, and it’s binary. Either the harvest is harvested, or it’s not, and the book is written, or it’s not.

You have so many different cultures that have come through Spain and left their mark, so you get a lot of these different influences that all kind of combine together and make for a fascinating experience.

Contentment is not the fulfillment of what you want, but the realization of how much you already have.

We also talk about his journey from a youth spent in Iowa (we’re pretty sure he must be related to someone we know), to Hollywood.

With documentary work, the editor really is writing the film in the editing room, taking this mountain of footage and shaping it into a coherent story

Life can take you down many paths, sometimes into trouble. But at the end of the road, sometimes we are blessed to return to family and their love for us. So sometimes you can go home.

In this conversation, Scott shares how he became a writer, why he believes the novel is important, and what draws him to writing about romance, albeit not in a typical way. “An Ocean Without a Shore” is a story of unrequited love, from the perspective of a gay man, which Scott is not, set in the late 1990’s to early 2000’s. Nevertheless, as Scott says, “I didn’t really doubt that I could do that, because we are all pretty similar. The historical experience of a hetero-normal man is very different than the historical experience of a gay man, but what we are deep inside is not that different – what brings us pleasure, what brings us pain. It’s called human nature, and that’s what novels are about.”

The novel is how we examine what it means to be a human being.

Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.

And some of us come back to it as adults, like Lawrence Eyre, Iowa born and bred, who spent most of his life as a teacher and tennis coach after earning a B.A. in American Studies from Yale. Eyre was named US Professional Tennis Association national high school coach of the year in 2009, and he coached both high school and college level. Upon retirement, he started writing haiku, and couldn’t stop. His first two collections are “Heartland Haiku” and “”Haiku Country,” both of which we explore in this delightful conversation.

Some Haiku arrived simply with the stork, others required long labor.

If what we love and do well helps others, that’s our natural best work.