MCrittenden
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Karma: 1 |  | Richard Godwin talks about writing and new book...
« Thread Started on Apr 22, 2012, 11:22pm » | |
Red Skies was able to pin down UK's own Crime Fiction writer Richard Godwin and ask him the nature of his business... Godwin is the author of Apostle Rising,
here on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Apostle-Rising-Ric....35153251&sr=1-1
and Godwin's latest, Mr. Glamour now on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Glamour-Richard....35153368&sr=1-1
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Here's what Richard had to say:
RedSkies:Can you tell us something about your writing process that defines your characters and why your books speak to such a large audience?
Godwin: My writing process is simply this, I write every day. I see it like practising my tennis serve. In terms of characterisation I am interested in people, in what makes them keep going from dusk till dawn, what motivates them, what scares them, what has screwed them up and what they aspire to. If you enter any shopping mall you can hear conversation, the lull between conversation, the insanity of everyday dialogue, the sheer unpredictable wasteland of it and its evasions, its endless evasions between families bent on the hope of fulfilling their dreams, dreams passed onto them by the culture whose rules they have inherited and are trying to interpret. I am grateful for my audience. I believe my books speak to a large audience because I started finding readers for my stories. I had begun writing novels before then but I found out through my stories what appealed.
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Red Skies: If you could put it in a nutshell what is the definitive noir collection for people new to the genre?
Godwin: I will speak of the classics, Ross MacDonald, The Drowning Pool, David Goodis, Cassidy's Girl, Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside me, Shepard Rifkin, The Murderer Vine, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon. The list could go on.
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Red Skies: What inspires you about popular culture, and what is your biggest drive as a writer?
Godwin: Nothing inspires me about popular culture except its demise. In itself it is an oxymoron since culture is the territory of the historian and defined retrospectively so the idea we are aware of our own environment is at best idealistic at worst deluded. Marshall McLuhan said a fish doesn't know it's in water. The Roman Empire had hope and syphilis, this is just a mass of manipulation and vacuous hype. An anachronism searching for meaning in an absent dictionary. Mass media manipulates for profit. Peoples' realities are being dictated to by the interests of monopolies.
As a writer I seek to tell a story. I seek to tell your story by making you see yourself, to recognise your own reflection and to see the lines sharpen in the portrait, and to relate to subject matter you may otherwise have dismissed, have otherwise thought was not something you would read.
Red Skies: Thank you for that, Mr. Godwin. Short and sweet. If you want to know more, purchase the aforementioned titles which are gaining popularity daily. Godwin's work is as prolific as it is entertaining, and he appears regularly on blogspots and havens for noir all over the net. He is also known to feature the rants of many prominent authors on his own Q&A spot, The Slaughterhouse http://www.richardgodwin.net/blog, a section of http://www.richardgodwin.net/. He is also a contributor to Red Skies anthologies, recently appearing in Dreams of Duality, and with an upcoming work slated for Techno-Goth Cthulhu...and we are proud to have him.
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AJ Hayes
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| | Re: Richard Godwin talks about writing and new boo
« Reply #1 on Apr 25, 2012, 1:02am » | |
Mr. Glamour is partly a savage Swiftian satire of the class system and partly a fascinating study of psychotic behavior (on both sides of the law), but in total, it is a rip roaring who-dunnit thriller with scenes that jump from the page and sear their way into the mind and a conclusion that will cause much thought in the reader.
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dorothyd
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Karma: 0 | | Re: Richard Godwin talks about writing and new boo
« Reply #2 on Apr 29, 2012, 10:50am » | |
I went and bought this book ...
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Dorothy Davies,
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