Ask the Author: A.E. Nasr
Answered Questions (5)
A.E. Nasr
History and tradition inspire me. I’m never so pleased to be a writer as when I sit with my elders and listen to their stories.
A.E. Nasr
Craft your sentences with love and attention. And then be prepared to kill them.
Read always, read a lot. You’ll never get done learning.
Forget every story you’ve heard about the impossible world of publishing. Good writing will always find its way to the reader.
Read always, read a lot. You’ll never get done learning.
Forget every story you’ve heard about the impossible world of publishing. Good writing will always find its way to the reader.
A.E. Nasr
Writing is a craft that allows you to use the words you love so much to inspire ideas, stir emotions and reflect our humanity. There’s something deeply gratifying about being able to express thoughts in straightforward terms and then having someone read them and say, ‘That’s exactly what I meant.�
A.E. Nasr
I’m not familiar with writer’s block � unless you consider the 20 years I spent fantasising about writing a novel and waiting for an idea to come to me. As it turns out, that’s not how it works. Not until my late thirties did I take a more proactive approach. I began writing about nothing in particular, but fairly quickly a story took shape that I knew I was meant to write.
A.E. Nasr
When I began MIRO, my debut novel, it was merely a writing exercise¬¬ � or rather an attempt, in my stubbornness, to prove that the advice I was getting from my family to ‘just sit down and write something� would get me nowhere. If I didn’t already have a story cooking in my head, it wasn’t going to magically appear when I started typing � or so I thought. I swallowed my scepticism, got behind the keyboard and wrote the first words that came to me. It was a barrage of argumentative dialogue beginning with two words: ‘Get up.�
Over the next few days, those few lines of dialogue stayed with me, and questions began to form. Who were these people arguing in the thick of night, and what were they running from? The characters began to take shape in my mind, and fairly quickly I knew the forces driving them. I was stunned by how easily a story came together that I cared about so deeply. They say, ‘Write what you know,� but the fact is that it happens anyway, and not in the way you think. Only years later, after I had finished my third or fourth draft, did I realise how much my novel was a reflection of my experiences. Yes, I had lived through war, and that was evident in my novel’s premise � escaped prisoners of war fighting for survival in an occupied land. But I had also been in love with Lord Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon, been blown away by Shakespeare’s use of language, and been captivated by Khalil Gibran’s purity of thought in The Prophet. It was all there on the page � in the way I constructed sentences and weaved storylines. MIRO was the sum of all my literary and real-life influences.
The simple answer to the question of where I got the idea for my novel is that it was a natural evolution based on all that I had seen and read and felt. Maybe it’s the luxury of the debut novelist. Maybe next time it won’t be so easy. What I learned was that a writer must trust that instinct to build on those principals of literature that made them want to be a writer in the first place. Trust that instinct � it’s not a bad place to start.
Over the next few days, those few lines of dialogue stayed with me, and questions began to form. Who were these people arguing in the thick of night, and what were they running from? The characters began to take shape in my mind, and fairly quickly I knew the forces driving them. I was stunned by how easily a story came together that I cared about so deeply. They say, ‘Write what you know,� but the fact is that it happens anyway, and not in the way you think. Only years later, after I had finished my third or fourth draft, did I realise how much my novel was a reflection of my experiences. Yes, I had lived through war, and that was evident in my novel’s premise � escaped prisoners of war fighting for survival in an occupied land. But I had also been in love with Lord Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon, been blown away by Shakespeare’s use of language, and been captivated by Khalil Gibran’s purity of thought in The Prophet. It was all there on the page � in the way I constructed sentences and weaved storylines. MIRO was the sum of all my literary and real-life influences.
The simple answer to the question of where I got the idea for my novel is that it was a natural evolution based on all that I had seen and read and felt. Maybe it’s the luxury of the debut novelist. Maybe next time it won’t be so easy. What I learned was that a writer must trust that instinct to build on those principals of literature that made them want to be a writer in the first place. Trust that instinct � it’s not a bad place to start.
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