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This
month TRRC is happy to share with you an interview with Gwynne
Forster. She has written
several books over the years and I am sure that most of you have read
at least one of her books. I
have always found her writing style interesting and was delighted that
she agreed to be Author of the Month for TRRC.
We would like to thank Ms. Forster for taking the time to
answer a few questions that I’m sure will give our readers a better
insight into the lady that writes fiction that touches the soul.
Lora
McDonald
LM:
Ms. Forster you have written several books over the years.
Would you please tell our readers a little about yourself?
GF:
I am a demographer, a social scientist who studies and analyses
the conditions that make a population grow, decline, alter its
characteristics through migration, births and deaths and other more
complicated factors. I'm trained for that with two degrees in
sociology and a degree in economics/demography. For years I wrote
technical works, worked for what seemed like half my life at United
Nations, New York in charge of research on fertility and family
planning.
I
used to joke with a French colleague that when I left the United
Nations, I was going to write on-the-edge novels, never dreaming that
I was telling the truth. It happened accidentally. While in Bangkok,
Thailand for the United Nations, and hungry for something to read that
wasn't work related, I bought the only English-language novel in my
hotel and, a blessing it was: A Woman Of Substance by Barbara Taylor
Bradford. And so began my foray into and love for women's fiction. I
began fiction writing in January 1994 and sold that book October 21,
1994. I have since written two books of mainstream fiction, twelve
romances and five romance novellas. Though I began writing romances,
I'm focusing now on general fiction, and I have just signed a contract
with Kensington Publishing Corp for two more books of mainstream
fiction.
Sunday
mornings that I'm in the city find me singing tenor on the church
choir. My husband and I like to entertain at dinner parties (small and
large ones), listen to music - classical, opera, jazz and blues. I
mean real gut bucket blues. Late afternoons in summer, I'm in my
garden, planting and tending pole beans, butter beans, tomatoes, okra,
peppers, herbs, collards, arugula, carrots and flowers.
LM:
How do you decide on the topic for your books?
GF:
I chose a title that fits the meaning or the moral of the
story. Sometimes I write down fifty possible titles. On other
occasions, the title comes along with the idea for the story.
LM:
For our readers that might have missed a book or two would you
please list your books?
GF:
Published Fiction by GWYNNE FORSTER:
MAINSTREAM
WOMEN'S FICTION:
BLUES
FROM DOWN DEEP (ISBN 1-57566-920-X)
WHEN
TWILIGHT COMES (ISBN 1-57566-919-6)
ROMANCE
TITLES:
SEALED
WITH A KISS (ISBN 0-7860-0189-5)
AGAINST
ALL ODDS (ISBN 0-7860-0308-1)
"Christopher's
Gifts" in SILVER BELLS (ISBN 0-7860-0333-2)
ECSTASY
(ISBN 0-7860-0416-9)
"A
Perfect Match" in I DO (ISBN 0-7860-0486-X)
OBSESSION
(ISBN 0-7860-0502-5)
NAKED
SOUL (Hard Cover: ISBN 1-885478-32-1)
BEYOND
DESIRE (ISBN 0-7860-0607-2)
"Love
for A Lifetime" in WEDDING BELLS (ISBN 1-58314-016-1)
NAKED
SOUL (Paperback: ISBN 1-885478-73-9)
FOOLS
RUSH IN (ISBN 1-58314-037-9)
AGAINST
THE WIND (ISBN 1-885478-90-9)
SWEPT
AWAY (ISBN 1-58314-098-0)
MIDNIGHT
MAGIC (ISBN-58571-019-9)
"Miracle
At Midnight" in MIDNIGHT CLEAR (ISBN 1-58571-039-3)
SECRET
DESIRE (ISBN 1-58314-124-3)
"Learning
To Love" in GOING TO THE CHAPEL (ISBN 0-312-97894-4)
SCARLET
WOMAN (ISBN 1-58314-192-8)
ONCE
IN A LIFETIME (ISBN 1-58314-193-6)
LM:
Which book is your favorite and why?
GF:
My favorite book is always the one I am writing. I believe that
is because I try to forget a book and what's in it as soon as I
finish. In that way, I am less likely to repeat myself. So I don't
remember well the content of earlier books.
LM:
Before you begin writing a book, what type of ideas run through
your mind as you prepare to decide on the personalities that your
characters will have?
GF:
Before I begin writing a book, I go through a number of thought
processes. I think the most important is whether the idea I have is
sufficient to sustain my interest for the better part of a year (this
is in respect to mainstream fiction), so I nurse the idea in various
ways for weeks. If I begin to think about it all the time, and ideas
for making the story interesting, ideas about subplots, twists and
turns in the story force me to start taking notes. I know then, that
it's a story I want to spend a few months of my life with. Since I
don't plot formally, I ask myself what kind of man or woman will bring
my story to life. I then interview him to find out who and what he is,
and all other characters come naturally, for they are either a
challenge to him, a problem, part of the solution to his problem or
they complement him (her if the story has a central female character).
The story emerges from this process, i.e, the characters are so drawn
as to tell me the story. I interview each major character.
LM:
As a romance writer do you ever write about romantic
experiences that have happened in your life or the life of others
close to you?
GF:
I have never used a personal experience in my stories, and only
once have I drawn a character to personify a friend. That was a
secondary character in AGAINST ALL ODDS, my second book.
LM:
What other romance writers do you like to read when time
permits?
GF:
Donna Hill's romances were exemplary - she now writes
mainstream, and so are Linda Howard's. I have all of Ms. Howard's
books, except her time travel stories. My imagination just doesn't
stretch that far.
LM:
In your latest book BLUES FROM DOWN DEEP, the storyline is
centered on a woman that longs to find her family after the death of
her father. In her quest
to get to know this new family she finds out other things that are
missing from her life. How
did you decide on this plot for a book?
GF:
This may sound strange, but I don't plot. My first mainstream,
WHEN TWILIGHT COMES, focused on the fragility of human relations and
on how quickly a family falls apart with the glue that holds it
together (even though family members may not identify that person as
such) no long functions. I had in mind when I wrote that that it would
be more difficult to build up a family that to tear one down, to start
with no one, to find and gather around us blood relatives (strangers)
who we could mold into a loving and supportive family. I decided to
write that story, and it evolved into BLUES FROM DOWN DEEP.
LM:
This book includes a discussion guide for the readers.
What would you like for readers to take away from this story?
GF:
As I wrote BLUES FROM DOWN DEEP, I realized the necessity of
showing that a person who is not a blood relative can be closer than
one who is and that blood ties are not a sufficient block on which to
build a family. One thinks of passion when one thinks of love and
desire. But humans are equally passionate about many other things,
sometimes more so; we are passionate about our identity, about our
origins, our goals, about rewarding our friends and defeating our
enemies (real or imagined), about hiding our shortcomings. We hate as
passionately as we love. And through all this, family is the most
important thing in our lives. If we don't have one, we wear it like a
psychological tattoo; if we are members of a loving one or a
dysfunctional one, we wear that as well. Family nurtures us as breast
milk nurtures a baby.
LM:
If there was one thing that you could change about your career
what would that be and why?
GF:
I had a great career as a demographer at the United Nations and
elsewhere, work that took me to 63 countries. I lived abroad for a
year, and I have dined with heads of state. And I am proud of my
twenty-seven published technical and academic titles. But I wish I had
started writing fiction earlier in my life and that I had begun with
general fiction rather than romance---as much as I enjoyed writing it.
There is no reward like meeting fans, reading their letters and
e-mails and, over the years, being drawn into their lives almost as a
member of their family.
LM:
For any of our readers that would like to get in touch with Ms.
Forster, her information is as follows.
GF:
I invite my readers to reach me by e-mail--GwynneF@aol.com; at
my web site - http://www.gwynneforster.com; at the online group that I
moderate - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VoicesForTheWrittenWord
(Click
here for a review of BLUES FROM DOWN DEEP)
(Click
here for a review of Once in a Lifetime)
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