Our Author Hero: Christopher Paolini
Excerpts from an Interview with the Washington Post
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/interview-with-christopher-paolini-author-of-eragon-books/2011/10/25/gIQA0gF7lM_story.html
Have you ever used your own experiences in your own work and if so, when?
Of course. I think every author does. There are numerous scenes throughout the Inheritance Cycle that I based partly or entirely on my own experiences. The advantage of writing from experience is that it often provides you with details that you would never think of yourself, no matter how rich your imagination. And specificity in description is something every writer should strive for.
Name one trick for good writing you would suggest for budding writers.
Read your work out loud. And read passages from your favorite authors out loud. The comparison will teach you a lot. Badly written prose can sometimes fool the eye, but it can rarely fool the ear.
How do you combat writer’s block?
By plotting things out in advance so that when I sit down at my computer, I know exactly what I’m going to write that day.
What would you say to a kid reading this who may want to be the next Christopher Paolini?
There are a couple of main things. Just writing a lot doesn’t necessarily make you a better writer. You have to hear yourself as a writer, and the best way to do that is to read your writing out loud. Then you’ll be able to hear things that sound wrong. I think I learned most from editing, both editing myself and having someone else edit me. It’s not always easy to have someone criticize your work, your baby. But if you can swallow your ego, you can really learn from the editing.
Why are the dragons different colours?
Why are humans different colours? I think dragons are different colours because, one, it would be kind of boring if they were all the same colour and, two, because the dragons want to be different colours. In my world, the dragons get to do what the dragons want to do and so no one's going to tell a dragon it can't be purple or pink or rainbow coloured so I think it's just because the dragons want to be different colours.
If you could have a dragon, what colour would it be and why?
It would definitely be blue but I'm partially colour blind and so the blue I'm thinking of is probably actually purple. But that, to me, is my favourite colour and that's why Saphira is blue as well.
Do you make up all the characters before you start a book or do you add characters as you go along?
I do both. Some of my characters I invented before I started writing the series. All of the main characters, I'd say, were invented before I started writing the series and they have to be because if you're going to figure out where the story's going, which you really need to do if you're creating a large, multi-volume story, in an imaginary world, it's best to put together a framework or roadmap to know where you're going before you dive into it. In that case, you really need to have a feel for who all the main characters are before you start so, for example, I outlined the whole series before I began Eragon and then I outlined Eragon specifically in pretty extensive detail before getting into it and I've done that with each of the books of the series. So, for Brisingr for example, I did a fourteen or fifteen page outline, single spaced and each paragraph dealt with one main story point. So, one paragraph would be Eragon goes to such and such a city, this this this happens, and then the next paragraph will say meanwhile, Roran does this this and this – things like that. I think it's important to do that because if you think about it in terms of music, first you compose a piece of music and then you can concentrate on performing it as beautifully as possible. But t is very hard to compose while perform. Some people can do it – I don't want to say it's impossible and some people prefer to work that way – but for me, and very many other authors, our brains just don't work that way. The rest of my characters evolved out of the needs of the rest of the story as I was writing the rest of the books. In the case of Angela the Herbalist, I didn't plan to put her in the story at all and she just ended up popping up as a bit of a surprise and taking over her scenes.