Interview Diana Kirk

 by daSkarles

Diana Kirk And A Few Words On Writing

Rub elbows with Diana Kirk, an award winning author who has spread her wings into e-publishing. She graciously shares her thoughts about her writing life in this interview of questions and answers.

Is this your first novel?

No. This is my tenth novel. I have had four novels under the name of Diana Hart and six under the name of Diana Kirk. My first novel was a medical thriller, A Caduceus is for Killing, that won the 2000 EPPIE award for Best Thriller Novel.

How did you get started into writing?

I am a medical coding instructor for Creighton University. One day a medical student asked me to write an article for the student newspaper. I wrote one called, The Theory of Academic Evolution and it went on to be nationally published by a medical journal and I was paid for it. I wrote several other medical papers that were easily sold, so when I decided to write a novel, I thought it would be a piece of cake. Let me tell you there's a big difference between article writing and fiction writing. It took me around twelve years to get that book the way I wanted it and then sell it.

Do you use a journal to take notes on what you may put in your book?

No, but I use a notebook, stickies, or anything else laying around the house that I can write on when the idea strikes.

Do you base your characters on people you know and if you do, how do you transform them?

Yes, I have. If it is a person I dislike, then I use their negative character traits, but change the physical description of the person. If it is someone I like, then I use some of their personality, but I glorify or exaggerate it. Most of the people who have read the book, have not recognized themselves.

What obstacles did you encounter in the beginning? And how did you overcome them?

Mainly rejection from New York because I sent my book to them before it was ready. But I stuck to it and kept submitting. Now, I am still overcoming obstacles and that is the stigma of being electronically published. As one of the pioneers in the early days of 1996, I spent a good deal of time explaining what an ebook was. Luckily, that argument has been settled and the old argument that a book has to have a cover and printed on paper is no longer an issue. Then, of course, there was the rejection by RWA stating that our publishers had to be recognized by sales of 5000 copies of a single book before authors would be allowed into their published chapter or enter the published author contests. The only way to overcome these negatives is to turn them into something positive. I keep working to write the best book I can write, so that I'm not guilty of settling.

How did your life change becoming a writer?

It didn't really change much, since I've been writing for almost 20 years now. I traded time I spent with hobbies and housework for writing. I have a wonderful supportive husband who helps out more than his 50% share in the housework. The only difference now, is that I have to market myself and that becomes very time consuming and difficult for a solitary person who likes to be holed up in her office writing the hours away.

What is your writing routine like?

I'm a pressure writer. I procrastinate until the last possible moment and then I write like crazy to get it done. I am trying, however, to become more organized since I now work part time for the University and teach writing part time for Long Ridge Writers Group. So, I set myself a page goal, not a time goal. My goal is two pages and if I can write more great, but if I can't that's okay also because I've reached my daily goal.

How do you gauge your success at the end of the day?

Success at the end of the day is if I have completed my page goal for that day. When I have lessons due to Long Ridge, my day is a success when I get them all packaged up and ready to go. I love that feeling. Then I get my next batch and it starts all over again.

Do you work from an outline?

Not an outline, but I do write a synopsis of anywhere from five to ten pages and I use that to keep myself on track. I have written both ways and it takes me much longer to write a book if I don't have my synopsis there. I guess I could call it my map because I stay on the trail to my ending. Different things in the middle of my synopsis may change because my characters tend to do what they want, but overall, especially when writing a mystery, I use the synopsis.

Do you know the ending of the book before you start or does it evolve as you go along?

Yes, I always know the ending. It may be fuzzy or incomplete, but I know what I want to accomplish with this book long before I even write the first word. What takes time is to make sure I can get to the ending I want given the trail my characters are on.

Have you taken any writing courses and if so, how did they help?

I have taken every college writing course at Creighton University and University of Iowa Correspondence Courses, along with Writer's Digest Short Story course. What these courses helped me to do was to understand all the different kinds of writing there are. Creative Writing at the college level that I took was basically literary writing and there was no focus on popular fiction. Today, more and more colleges and universities are offering popular fiction writing. To define the two, I would generically say that literary fiction focuses on the character and the inner struggle of the mind and less emphasis is given to plot. Popular fiction focuses on plot and characterization and the objective of the fiction is to entertain. I'm not saying that literary fiction cannot entertain or have a good story, it's just that popular fiction has the purpose of entertainment as it's primary goal.

Where do you get your ideas?

That's like saying where do I get the air that I breathe. I have more ideas floating around in my head than time to write them down. Even when I do write the ideas down, I file them away and don't come upon them for years. I guess I have to say that the book I'm writing at whatever moment in time is the greatest idea I have ever had ... until the next book. Yet, ideas are one thing and turning them into a novel is another. The problem with fiction is that it always has to follow a certain motivational logic.

Life can be random and things can happen without motivation of any sort. Look at the WTC tragedy. If someone had told me that two planes would fly into the WTC and cause two one-hundred-and-ten-story buildings to collapse, I would have said it would never work because that would be unbelievable. And from a fiction standpoint it wouldn't have unless you knew and explained the physics of such a thing beforehand. Even the scientists that CNN and Fox News interviewed had trouble believing that the building collapsed and when they explained it from a scientific viewpoint, people had trouble understanding.

But, with fiction, every single action must have a motivation before it and the action must in turn create a reaction. These motivation/reaction units are what propels the story along smoothly. I'm a student of the great Dwight Swain whose book, Techniques of the Selling Writer has been out there for years teaching people how to write popular fiction. In his words, first you will think an action, then you will act, then someone or something will react. This is the order in which things have to happen in fiction.

What writers have influenced your own work?

Oh, boy. So many writers. Pam Hart, Dwight Swain, Dean Koontz, Margaret Sutton, Stephen King, Theresa Weir, HL Mencken, Raymond Chandler, Isac Asimof, Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, Oscar Wilde, Ed Gorman.

What is the best advise you can give to an aspiring writer?

Writing is hard. So many people think they are writers and can sit down and write a book. But that is when they realize what it takes to be a writer. Pulling the ideas from your mind is painful, then you have to make them work in a logic that fits the story. And if that isn't enough, you have to sit there for the three to six to twelve months or more that it takes to write a novel. Then comes the repeated process of sending it out to editors and receiving rejection letters. And once it is accepted, this is where you have to form a tough skin, hide, shell whatever you want to call it. Don't believe the bad reviews you get and especially don't believe the good reviews. I try to always maintain the humility that I had the first time I wrote anything and submitted it for the world to read--a mixture of elation and dread that equals fear. I repeat the mantra, "You're only as good as your next book." And that keeps me writing the best book I can write.

Thank you Dorothy for the opportunity to answer these very interesting questions.

Diana

And take a look at Diana’s web page…