About Iain Reading
Iain Reading is passionate about Root Beer, music, and writing. He is
Canadian, but currently resides in the Netherlands working for the United
Nations. Iain is currently working on the fourth book in the Kitty Hawk Flying
Detective Agency Series, which will be released in 2014. For more information, go to http://www.kittyhawkworld.com/
VS: I want to thank you for being my guest here on The Writing
Mama today. Iain, How long have you been
writing?
Iain: I have been writing for just over a year now, although I
now realize that I wish I'd started with it long ago.
VS: What inspired you to write your book (if this is a personal
story about you, please share about the decision to open up about your life)?
Iain: The inspiration for writing my book comes entirely from
the main character herself - Kitty Hawk. The idea of a female
teenaged seaplane pilot who wants to fly around the world just seemed so
perfectly inspiring to me that I couldn't help but want to bring her to life by
writing it.
VS: What is a typical writing day like for you?
Iain: A typical writing day always begins with some kind of
exercise in focussing my thoughts and having a clear idea of what I want to
accomplish and where things are going. Not in too much detail, of
course, but just enough to be clear about things. This is usually
accomplished by taking a walk alone and just sorting out my thoughts and
writing the next chapter in my head, more or less.
VS: What did you find to be the most challenging part of
writing your book(s)?
Iain: Finding the "voice" of the characters in the
book and even of the entire book itself is what I find
challenging. Unfortunately, it seems to me that finding this is
something that you only find once you are already well into writing the book
(which either means going back and redoing the first parts you already wrote or
just living with it). And I guess this is what I find the most
liberating about writing a series of books - the fact that I already have found
the book's "voice" and can start in with it from day one and page
one.
VS: What part of your book do you feel really stands out to you
personally?
Iain: Something I really love about this book (Kitty Hawk and
the Curse of the Yukon Gold) is how it feels when it really gets
going. It sort of slowly creeps up on the tipping point to the main
rollercoaster of action, but when it gets there it has this really lovely
feeling to it, racing from one thing to the next like a string of
firecrackers. Some of the firecrackers are even quite obvious when
you look back on them, like clichéd elements that every good book about Alaska
and the Yukon needs to have, but to me they never feel cliché because you're
being carried along in the story like a glacial river in flood.
VS: If this is a work of fiction, what character is most like
you?
Iain: I suppose they all are, in their own small
way. The conventional wisdom is that writers should "write what
they know" and from that you'd assume that writers make all characters a
bit like themselves because that's what they know. But maybe in
making each character just a little bit like myself I am doing the opposite...
writing to know myself better instead of writing WHAT I know already.
VS: Do you have any other works in progress? Can you share a
little about them?
Iain: Right now I am working on a new series of books about a
guild of wizards living in the modern world. It's something
completely different from the Kitty Hawk series (which I will return to, of
course - I won't leave her out there until she's finished her flight around the
world) and I was just very curious what it would be like if I wrote a book (or
two or three or five) in the over-crowded fantasy genre. So we'll
see how that turns out.
VS: What do you think are the basic ingredients of a good book?
Iain: Aside from what are the standard things (characters,
plot, etc) I think what is important thing is to create a world that draws
people into it. I would love to be able to say that I wrote a book
where people felt like they were living the story instead of just reading about
it.
VS: What is required for a character to be believable? How do
you create yours?
Iain: Lately I am thinking a lot about believable
characters. Specifically about how much depth they have on the
written page. This stems from my concern about having
two-dimensional (or god forbid even ONE-dimensional) characters too often in my
writing. Some of them are, I know, but I am okay with
that. But how does one ensure that the characters that they really
need to have depth are truly three-dimensional and believable? I
suppose the way to accomplish that is to make sure that those characters
actually DO have depth, at least in your own head as the
writer. Every character in life or books always has a backstory and
motivations, right? You don't always know what it is - in fact, you
almost never really do know - but it's always there whether you know it or
not. So as a writer maybe the secret is to know all that stuff
yourself, even if you never put it down on the page. If you know
yourself what their backstory is and what their motivations
are, then the action and dialogue that you actually do write
might then be believable and three-dimensional. I hope?
VS: Where can the readers of The Writing Mama find out more
about and your writing?
Iain: Fans of the Kitty Hawk series can always check in with www.kittyhawkworld.com to see the
latest state of all things Kitty Hawk. And anyone interested in the
music side of things can also check out my music website at www.secretworldonline.com as well.