Karen A. Wyle, Author of Twin-Bred (Science Fiction)
Karen A. Wyle was born a Connecticut Yankee, but moved every few years throughout her childhood and adolescence. After college in California, law school in Massachusetts, and a mercifully short stint in a large San Francisco law firm, she moved to Los Angeles, where she met her now-husband, who hates L.A. They eventually settled in Bloomington, Indiana, home of Indiana University.
Karen’s childhood ambition was to be the youngest ever published novelist. While writing her first novel at age ten, she was mortified to learn that some British upstart had beaten her to the goal at age nine.
Karen has been a voracious and compulsive reader as long as she can remember. Do not strand this woman on a plane without reading matter! Karen was an English and American Literature major at Stanford University, which suited her, although she has in recent years developed some doubts about whether studying literature is, for most people, a good preparation for enjoying it. Her most useful preparation for writing novels, besides reading them, has been the practice of appellate law — in other words, writing large quantities of persuasive prose, on deadline, year after year.
Karen’s voice is the product of almost five decades of reading both literary and genre fiction. It is no doubt also influenced, although she hopes not fatally tainted, by her years of law practice. Her personal history has led her to focus on often-intertwined themes of family, communication, the impossibility of controlling events, and the persistence of unfinished business.
Annie K. Johnson – What do you want readers to take away from your book?
Karen A. Wyle – I’d like them to close the book feeling contemplative, somewhat sad, and somewhat hopeful. I guess I’m hoping to convey the mixed message that our endeavours may be based on inadequate information and may have unintended consequences — but that it’s still worth trying to make a difference.
AKJ – How has writing been different than what you’d imagined?
KAW – After giving up on writing fiction, especially novels, many years back, and then trying again, I thought it would be harder to generate lots of words. In the interim, I became an appellate attorney and learned to turn out large quantities of persuasive prose without any great suffering — and the skill is partially transferable to fiction.
AKJ – Do you have any regrets?
KAW – I can point to quite a few things I would advise someone to do differently, faced with various decisions I encountered in my life — but I don’t wish I’d actually followed any of that good advice, because any substantial changes in my past would probably have prevented me from meeting my husband and/or having my children. (That way of thinking about the question may come from all my years of reading time travel and alternate history stories.)
AKJ – How do you come up with the names of characters?
KAW – Some of them start with handy abbreviations — for example, M.C. for Main Character, L.T. for Lost Twin. I often search online for names with particular meanings, and pick those whose sound I like.
AKJ – What has been the most fun part of being a writer?
KAW – I love having a story or its characters surprise me! — for example, when an element I
added casually or for one purpose turns out to be important for some quite different
reason.
AKJ – Are there things that you refuse to write about? What are they and why?
KAW – I won’t write about extreme cruelty. I don’t want to take my imagination into that evil a place. I’m not saying authors shouldn’t go there — I just don’t want to do so.
I might publish light erotica at some point, but I doubt I’ll ever be interested in the more crudely worded type of explicit erotica.
AKJ – How did you come up with the title of your book?
KAW – This is a bit of a sore point for me at the moment — because I’m trying desperately to come up with a title for my next novel. (The working title was too common, and not all that interesting or fitting.) I don’t think I’m very talented at titles. My daughters’ special stuffed toys ended up with the very literal names “Special Bear” and “Puppy.” In my early twenties, I had a coffee plant named “Coffee.” . . . So once I decided that my specially produced twins would be called Twin-Bred, I took the path of least resistance and used the same word for the title.
AKJ – How do you decide which parts of the book to leave out when editing or reviewing your own writing?
KAW – I look for scenes that neither advance the plot nor further illuminate the characters. Sometimes, a beta reader will suggest that some of the scenes involving a particular character are redundant, and I’ll reluctantly agree. Or I might write a scene that seems so brilliant that I’m ecstatic — only to realize that it presents insuperable problems for my plot.
These situations, encountered by many an author, have inspired the phrases “kill your darlings” or “murder your babies” (shudder). I try to recycle at least part of such scenes if I can.
Follow Karen:
http://www.facebook.com/KarenAWyle
http://www.facebook.com/TwinBred
@WordsmithWyle
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