About Robert Scott:
My literary life has been unconventional but like any good novel, the chapters are varied and there are twists. I started my writing life while attending Cornell Law School. There I served as Co-Managing Editor for the Cornell Law Review. I wrote articles for that publication and co-authored another for a different law review. Writing then took a back seat to my career as an attorney. My lawyering took me from Wall Street to Adak, Alaska and Athens, Greece, returning eventually to my home in North Central Washington where I finished up my working life representing migrant farmworkers. Throughout all this, the desire to write never left me. Since retirement, I have written non-fiction articles for an on-line magazine as well as for a local print magazine. In 2012 I self-published a novel, “Two Friends, Too Old.” I am a member of a writer’s group that meets bi-monthly to critique each other’s work.
Law and writing only tell part of my story. I am an avid outdoorsman, spending large parts of my life hiking, sailing, kayaking, skiing, biking and more, including completing the 220-mile Iditaski Race in Alaska. Most recently I have gone on self-guided canoe and rafting trips in the Artic, in the Yukon, and in Cambodia. I also worked as a volunteer in Chile and Peru where I improved my Spanish language skills, and in for six weeks 2014 I volunteered in India. These are all experiences I expect may influence or at least color my writing in the future. They have certainly made for interesting parts of my own life story.
What inspires you to write?
I write because I enjoy creating a story, seeing black letters on a white piece of paper evolving into a picture. Sometimes the relationship is between two people, sometimes it is among several people, and sometimes it is within just one person. I want to see if I have the ability to describe a series of events with which a reader can identify but at the same time are unusual enough to be intriguing. I think this is difficult to do and I enjoy the challenge this presents.
Tell us about your writing process.
I have published one book and am working on a second and I used a different process for each. With my first book, Two Friends Too Old, I was more of “seat of the pants” writer. In Two Friends, I did not know what the ending would be until I wrote some dialogue on the next to the last page, and then the ending literally leaped out at me. I do not know if I would have arrived at this ending had I been more methodical in laying out the story and so because the ending fit so well I thought the “seat of the pants” approach worked very well.
With my second book, How Jennifer Sees It, I knew generally how the story would end when I started and drove the story toward that ending. I also had a general sequence of events in mind when I started. However, this somewhat undisciplined approach resulted in the story at first having a substantial amount of unnecessary material that bogged the story down. In retrospect, I think the writing would have been more efficient had I spent some time planning the story before I began.
I like to write first thing in the morning when I am fresh. I generally can spend about two hours before I lose my sharpness. However, if I am having a problem, I do not stop until I have solved that problem. I frequently find that throughout the day I am thinking about what I wrote in the morning and many times discover ways of improving that piece, sometime by just merely reversing the order of a couple of sentences.
Although I have written only two novels, I think what I like doing is finding a theme currently running through our society and then trying to wrap a story around the theme. This was certainly true with How Jennifer Sees It, which is the story of a divorce seen through the eyes of a sixteen-year old girl.
For Fiction Writers: Do you listen (or talk to) to your characters?
I do not consciously talk to my characters and I am not sure I listen to them. What I try to do is to literally get into their head and look at their world with their eyes, as if I had a video camera on their head delivering a live feed to me. I am frequently surprised by what I see.
What advice would you give other writers?
I will pass on some advice an editor gave to me, read good literature. And as you read it, try to think critically why it appeals to you. My own advice would be to remind writers that writing well is hard work, very hard work, and requires the writer to be brutally honest with him/herself. I would also advice writers to try to write every day to keep one’s skills sharp.
How did you decide how to publish your books?
I had written a novel and wanted to see if it was any good. I decided the best way to determine that would be if others read it and in order to have others read it, I had to publish it. I could not interest any publisher in my novel so I decided to self-publish. I found a company that was extremely writer-oriented and for a very modest fee it did all the work to get my novel in print and in electronic form. It also got my book on all major online book stores such as Amazon. With this company I could concentrate on the writing and it took care of all of the details. I would recommend this company to any writer who would prefer to leave the publishing issues to someone else.
What do you think about the future of book publishing?
People will continue to want to read so I think book publishing has a good future. I also think there will always be a healthy market for books in print.
What do you use?: Professional Editor, Professional Cover Designer, Beta Readers
What genres do you write?: General Fiction, YA
What formats are your books in?: Both eBook and Print
Website(s)
Robert Scott Home Page Link
Link To Robert Scott Page On Amazon
Your Social Media Links
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All information in this post is presented “as is” supplied by the author. We don’t edit, to allow you, the reader, to hear the author in their own voice.
