Stephen Donaldson - Online Profile
Stephen Donaldson on The Bard, comics and having no time for bad books...
What was your favourite childhood book?
Which book has made you laugh?
Life on the Mssissippi by Mark Twain.
Which book has made you cry?
Apart from my own? None that I can remember.
Which book would you never have on your bookshelf?
Anything by Robert Jordan.
Which book are you reading at the moment?
Some Do Not. Book One of Ford Madox Ford's four-part masterpiece, Parade's End.
Which book would you give as a present to a friend?
That depends on the friend. There is no "one size fits all" in books. But at a guess: Paul Scott's The RAJ Quartet.
Which other writers do you admire?
Patricia A. McKillip, Steven Erikson, Tim Powers, Paul Scott, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, George Meredith, Sir Walter Scott, William Faulkner, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, J. R. R. Tolkien.
Which classic have you always meant to read and never got round to it?
Virgil's Aeneid.
What are your top five books of all time, in order or otherwise?
In no particular order:
The Chinese Love Pavilion by Paul Scott
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Book of Atrix Wolfe by Patricia A. McKillip
Tales of the Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
Emma by Jane Austen
What is the worst book you have ever read?
My Name is Vladimir Sloifoisky, author blissfully forgotten.
Is there a particular book or author that inspired you to be a writer?
Strange as this may sound, the Buck Rogers comic strips as they existed in the mid-1950's (when I was 8-10 years old) started me down the slippery slope of storytelling.
What is your favourite time of day to write?
Whenever I'm in the zone. Sometimes that happens in the morning. Sometimes it happens in the afternoon. (Sometimes both, although that's rare.) But I never write in the evenings, or at night, or on weekends, or on holidays, or on...
And favourite place?
I own a small apartment that I use as an office so that I can "go away" to work, just like people with real jobs.
Longhand or word processor?
I have poor "small motor" skills. I couldn't write a poem longhand, never mind a novel. Therefore I type. But poor small motor skills affect typing as well; so the advent of word processors came as a real blessing: I no longer have to re-type entire books as I once did.
Which fictional character would you most like to have met?
Sorry. Can't think of any on such short notice.
Who, in your opinion, is the greatest writer of all time?
If I didn't say Shakespeare, I would probably have to slit my wrists.
Which book have you found yourself unable to finish reading?
Gosh, there have been so many. I'm a very slow reader, my standards are high, and life is short. I set aside any book which doesn't convince me almost immediately that the author knows what s/he is doing, or that the story matters.
What is your favourite word?
Amniocentesis. Don't ask, I can't explain it.
Other than writing, what other jobs or professions have you undertaken or considered?
None, really. Oh, I've taught various things, and done a bit of editing. But writing stories is the work I was born to do, and I've concentrated on it almost exclusively for 35+ years now.
What was the first piece you ever had in print?
Now you're trying to embarrass me. My first published piece was a letter to the editors of the Fantastic Four comic book, a letter for which I won what the Marvel Comics editors called a "No-Prize". What can I tell you? I was young.
What are you working on at the moment?
Against All Things Ending, Book Three of The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.
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