Dr. Debra Doyle writes science fiction and fantasy. Alongwith her husband, James D. MacDonald, she has co-authored several series,including the Circle of Magic and Mageworld. She is able to juggle her writingand family, and still has time to attend conventions. In this email interview,Debra gives useful ideas to aspiring writers.


What made you startwriting?

I started out by reading a lot. Some time between third grade andjunior high, I realized that all the books I'd been reading hadn't just grown ontrees, they'd been written by people. I read a couple of books somewhere in therethat had characters who were writers, which is probably what clued me in. JoMarch in Little Women is one example, and I remember wanting to be her when Igrew up.


Did you have to give up other goals to become a writer?

I was diverted for a while from wanting to be a writer by wanting to be aprofessor of Old English literature at college. But by the time I finishedgetting my doctorate (which you need if you're going to do something like that),the job market for brand-new Ph. D's in English literature had alreadystarted on the long downhill slide it's still on. I've taught college English nowand then, as adjunct faculty (that's academic English for "a temp with aPh.D"), but it's never been anything other than freshman English.

So, like a number of other bright young academics of my generation, Iwound up writing science fiction and fantasy instead - something for which anadvanced degree in English is, believe it or not, actually excellentpreparation.

I don't for a moment regret the time I spent in grad school.I was having more fun than the law allows, just about, and if everybody in theprogram didn't eventually have to finish the degree and get out, I'd undoubtedlystill be there, haunting the stacks of the University of Pennsylvania library andhappy as a clam at high tide.


What were you like inschool?

Your basic she-nerd. I played clarinet in the marching band(badly, I was the third worst clarinet player in the section), wrote copy for theyearbook, which meant that I got to think up flattering things to say about abunch of people I couldn't stand - excellent practice for a future fictionwriter. I never did get asked to the prom.


Was your familysupportive, or did you have to pave your own way to become a writer?

Theywere incredibly supportive, and still are. They buy all my books, and when theysee them on the shelves in bookstores, they turn them so they're faceout.


What advice can you give aspiringwriters?

Read a lot, read everything you can get your hands on, in a lotof different fields. Read history and science as well as fiction, read olderliterature as well as the new stuff.

And write a lot. Practice isimportant in this business, and it's often said that you have to write a millionwords of junk before you can do anything worth reading. I didn't finish writingmy own million words of junk until I was past 30. If I'd kept up my fictionwriting when I was in graduate school instead of concentrating on the academicstuff, I might have gotten the junk out of my system sooner. Or maybe not. It'shard to tell about these things.


How do your four children reactto your books?

They don't think that being a writer is odd, becausethey've always watched me doing it. Some of my books they like, and others theydon't - they like different books at different ages, too, and not all of themlike the same ones.


Are your books meant for a particularaudience?

Some of my books are YA (that is, "teenager") books;others are for adults. Other than that, we mostly write books we think we'd liketo read, and hope that others will like them too.


Do any of yourbooks link to real-life experiences?

Not really. My co-author andI use bits and pieces of our experiences in our writing, all writers do, butsince we write fantasy and science fiction, by the time anything makes it ontothe page it's been put through all sorts of transformations and mutations andgenetic engineering maneuvers, and its own mother wouldn't recognize it anymore(at least, that's our deep, sincere hope).


What conditions do youlike to write in?

I use a computer and a word processing program. I got myfirst computer way back in 1983; before then I was a hit-and-miss kind of writer,with most of my stuff unrevised and written by hand, because I was an absolutelydreadful typist. It used to take me half an hour to type up a page with fewenough visible errors that I could actually submit it for publication, and eventhen the page would have so much white-out that it looked positively leprous.

Needless to say, I wasn't submitting much for publication in those days.Then the personal computer revolution came along, and all of a sudden there was amachine - a machine I could even (almost) afford - and it was a better typistthan I was. I could make all the mistakes I needed to, and correct them on-screenwith a few keystrokes and a flicker of pixels, and when I was done, my printerwould turn out a lovely clean copy. Liberation! It waswonderful!


Where do you get most of your ideas?

Aieeee!Everybody asks writers this, and it drives us nuts because there really isn't ananswer. In a sense, part of what makes a writer is that a writer is a person whothinks about life in terms of story ideas to start with.

An example: thereare those logic problems you run into sometimes, the ones about the guy who has,say, a darkened bedroom and a drawer full of an equal number of white socks andblack socks, and you're supposed to figure out how many times he's going to haveto reach into the drawer if he wants to be sure of ending up with a pair ofmatching socks. And all the math nerds can figure out these problems in a snap;meanwhile, the writers are getting sidetracked by wondering who the heck this guyis, why he's dressing in the dark, and if it's so all-fired important to him thathis socks match, why doesn't he tie them together in pairs as they come out ofthe dryer? I already know why he only has white socks and black socks: he's inthe Navy. But he's not a naval aviator, because then he would also have brownsocks, and the logic problem would be harder.


What do you think isyour biggest accomplishment?

Writing books that people actually seem towant to read.


Was it hard to get published?

Getting yourwork published is like getting pickles out of a jar: the first one is thehardest. After that it gets a bit easier.


What is your favoritebook?

Depends on the mood I'm in. I like Beowulf a lot.


Didyou always want to write?

Pretty much always, once I realized that writingwas something people did.


Did anyone notice your talent forwriting when you were young?

My parents always encouraged me, and so did afew of my teachers.


Which author's work do you think your workmost closely relates to?

It's hard to say. Most modern fantasy owes a debtto Tolkien, of course, but I went from reading Tolkien to reading his medievalsources, and then came back to fantasy from there. As far as the science fictiongoes - my co-author and I do space opera, in the tradition of E. E."Doc" Smith's Lensman series (The Gray Lensman and others) and JamesSchmitz's The Witches of Karres, not to mention a host ofothers.


What are your hobbies?

Well, writing used to be ahobby, until I started doing it for a living. I read books a lot when I have thetime. And I spend a lot of time on the Internet.


What is your homelife like? What do you do on a normal day?

Get up. Get the kids off toschool. Make coffee. Sit at computer. Type. Make more coffee. Type. Say hi to thekids when they come home from school. Type. Make dinner. Type. Go to bed. Repeat.Vary this on weekends by going to science fiction conventions every sooften.


What is one thing you think the world would benefitfrom?

The romantic in me says "workable interstellar spaceflight." The practical person with an electric bill to pay says, "areliable source of safe, cheap energy."