An Interview with Marilynn Byerly

Marilynn Byerly is a published mixed genre author. She has published romance and science fiction books. Romantic Times has been quoted to say she's an author to watch. Marilynn Byerly has won numerous awards for her books including the National Reader's Choice award.

How did you get into writing? At what age did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I've always wanted to be a writer. I come by my storytelling abilities and interests naturally. My dad told wonderful bedtime stories about Bushy Tail Squirrel--his variation on the Br'er Rabbit stories, and he wrote an often humorous hunting column for the local newspaper.

Supper involved Southern tale-spinning from various family members. Coming from a large family and being quiet in comparison to my talkative family members, I tended to tell my stories only to myself.

As I grew older, I fell in love with horses and books, and I wrote my first novel about a horse. WINGED KING was a whopping ten pages long in large hand-printed letters.

My inner stories soon involved my favorite TV characters, and I created a whole universe of different characters to interact with them. When I realized that Mr. Spock from STAR TREK and Artemis Gordon from THE WILD, WILD WEST couldn't really meet, I solved my problem by making many of my own characters members of a long-lived alien race of time travelers--the Immortals.

Much later, I borrowed from these imaginative forays into an alien culture to write my first science fiction novel, THE ONCE AND FUTURE QUEEEN.

My passion for books led me into graduate school as a literature major, and I used what little time and creative energy I had left to write poetry and an occasional short story, but I promised myself that one day I'd write the novels I had floating around my head.

After my dad died from cancer, I realized that life was too short not to write those novels. A month after his death, I began my first novel, and I haven't really stopped since.

What was your first book or story that you completed? Did you ever get it published?

My first novel started out as a thriller but kept getting stranger and stranger as I went along when I started adding romance, psychics, the astral plane, and professional magicians who discovered that some magic was real.

At the time I wrote it, the paranormal thriller didn't exist. It wouldn't exist for over twenty years so there was no publisher interested in it.

The first novel I sold was number 7, TIME AFTER TIME. After that, novel 4, then novel 11, number 9, and number 8.

How did you get published? How were you able to write full time? What is your success story?

My first book sold was TIME AFTER TIME. I originally wrote the book for the Harlequin/Silhouette category market, but it was too unconventional. Electronic publisher Hard Shell saw its uniqueness as a virtue rather than a fault and bought it.

TIME AFTER TIME went on to be a major award winner as well as a lifetime bestseller for Hard Shell.

I don't write full time in the sense that I make my living at writing, but I do spend four to six hours a day writing, promoting, and doing the business "stuff" of being a professional writer.

I also teach writing, do a blog on writing, and work occasionally as a book doctor.

How do you stay motivated to finish a novel?

If the characters are real to me, it's a story I want to tell, or something I want to say, I have no problem writing it. I enjoy the whole writing process.

When the writing isn't fun, I keep at it because that's what a professional writer does, and the writing eventually becomes fun again.

I keep on track by having a basic plot outline which keeps me moving forward, as well.

How do you get your ideas?

I start out with a general premise or one image or scene as the embryo for the novel. The images or scenes often come in a dream.

Years ago, I dreamed of a boat explosion and a woman, aboard it, outlined by its flames, her hair blazing upward like some goddess of death's. The images were so powerful they woke me.

As I lay awake thinking about them, my inner curious writer asked, "Why was she on that boat? Who is she? Why did the boat blow up?" Then the most important question a writer can ask came to me. "What happens next?"

That answer became GUARDIAN ANGEL, a romantic suspense novel.

STAR-CROSSED, my science fiction romance, started as a premise after I read a novel which used sexual slavery as sexy fun and titillation. Horrified by the book's treatment of women, I had the evil thought--what would happen if men were the sex slaves, not women?

By switching the genders, I would be able to make my points about the inhumanity of such treatment and the corrosive results on a society as a whole. I would also have one heck of a romantic adventure setting on another planet.

What would you tell people who are interested in writing creatively? Where can people start?

Write, don't talk about what you are going to write. And read like crazy the kinds of books you want to write.

Find some form of mentor to help you learn the craft of writing. This mentoring may be in the form of writing classes on the Internet or locally.

Writing is fun, but the craft of writing is hard. You must work at it. Michael Jordan didn't walk onto the court for the first time and do what he did years later. He had to learn his craft and practice it. He constantly improved, even after becoming a professional, by practicing. A writer is no less a trained craftsman.

When I announced my first sale, a friend sent me this quote from James Baldwin, "Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck--but, most of all, endurance."

How do you get over writer's block?

For me, writer's block during a project means I've made the wrong turn in what I'm writing, and I have to figure out what went wrong before I can go on.

Long-term writer's block is much more problematic because it's based on depression and being whacked one too many times with rejection, ill luck, betrayal, or health issues.

A few times when I was between projects and editor rejections of my books were coming fast and furious, I've suffered massive writer's block and have been unable to face a new novel. Disappointments and loss of eminent sales by disappearing book lines and vanishing editors is rough. The professional writer's life definitely isn't for sissies.

At these times, I've written something else like a short story or an article to remind myself of the joy of writing, and I've been able to start another novel.

To find out more about Marilynn Byerly and her published work, go to Marilynn Byerly's official website.