Gwen Masters Interview

How would you describe yourself? Who is Gwen Masters?

I’m the girl next door with a sensual twist. I’m southern to the core, passionate about what I believe in and sometimes foolhardy enough to speak before I think. I’m funny when I drink and annoying when I’m tired. I love chess even though I lose most of the time. I sometimes have a one-track mind. I drive too fast but always wear my seat belt. I’m a devoted mother, an avid lover, a dedicated conservationist, and the kind of friend who never forgets to bring the wine.

What sort of books did you enjoy as a child and what do you like to read now?

As a child, I read voraciously. I still do. I love to open up a book and spend hours losing myself in it. It’s one of life’s ultimate guilty pleasures, to lose oneself in another world for a while.

When I was in elementary school, I devoured anything by Madeline L’Engle –- A Wrinkle in Time was something I loved so much, I checked it out of the library over and over, until the librarian told me I had to let someone else have a crack at it. Then I moved on to A Swiftly Tilting Planet – Lovely! I read all the Nancy Drew books. I discovered my cousin’s cache of Piers Anthony novels, and he was kind enough to let me have full rein over his collection. Then it was Stephen King, and I got good and hooked on those. To this day I’m a huge Stephen King fan.

I also read a lot of books on forensics. My mother was very interested in everything concerning that. She went back to college while I was a teenager, to pursue a degree in criminal investigation. It wasn’t unusual to hear stories about autopsies and crime scenes while we were sitting around the dinner table. It sounds strange to say that now, but that’s just the way it was – my mother was just telling us about her day, and that was part of her day. I think that’s why I keep coming back to writing crime novels. I’m working on one right now, tentatively titled Serial Rodney, which definitely comes from all those dinner-time discussions.

I like to spend my time on novels that have a time-tested historical or cultural impact. I love The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath. I enjoy biographies or anthologies of classic literature. I just finished Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and I loved it. It is filled with layer after layer of political, cultural and moral statements. I can’t get it out of my head – I’ve been dreaming about it. I love novels like that, the ones that take up residence in my head and stay awhile.

What were your dreams or ambitions as a child? How do these compare with where you are now?

I always wanted to be a writer. That dream was always in the back of my mind, and I was always working toward it in some way, whether I realized it or not. I had a few ambitions on the side, but those never went into a serious “could I really do this?” kind of thought.

For quite some time, I wanted to be a jockey – and then I shot up to my current height of five feet, four inches at the age of twelve, and I knew I was going to be too tall for the big-league equestrian races. I listened to WSM on my radio at night and wanted to be Loretta Lynn. I went through a phase of wanting to work in radio or the music business, and I actually tried that out in high school – it was great, but my mind was always wandering a bit too much. In college I spent time working with film and theatre, everything from stage production to running the projector in the campus movie house. It intrigued me, but it didn’t become my passion. I was already writing up a storm by then anyway, and I knew what my career path would be.

Do you think you were "born a writer"? Or did the writing bug take awhile to find you?

I think I was born into it. My mother was always writing something – she still does, when she has the time. My grandfather always had a book in his shirt pocket. The dashboard of his truck was a veritable library of them. The bookcases in the house were filled to bursting. My grandmother is very romantic about her books, very protective. To this day she has a volume of good poetry on that old end table next to her favorite chair. In an atmosphere like that, being a writer was something that came as natural as breathing.

Are there any particular authors who've been influential to your work?

There are quite a few. In order to become better at any job, at any craft, you have to look at the others who are doing it. I’ve read passages in certain novels and thought, okay, I need to work on character development, because this is how you do it! I’ve read novels and thought, alright, this has been done to death, how could it be spun in a different way?

I read House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III and I was blown away by it. Not a single word is unnecessary. It’s so tightly written, it pulls you in immediately and doesn’t let go. I love the intricacy of Anita Shreve – she can pack an enormous wallop of emotion in one simple sentence, just by clever placement in the story. Barbara Kingsolver is one of those who writes so vividly, it’s hard to imagine that novels like The Poisonwood Bible are fictional. That book is so real, you can feel the heat, you can hear the tongues, you can taste the dirt. It’s gorgeous. I want to write like that.

Have you seen an evolution in your writing? What steps did it take?

I used to be a very romantic kind of girl, the wine-and-roses thing. My first manuscript was like that. To be honest, it was bloody awful. Instead of condensing a minor thought down to one sentence, I was writing whole unnecessary paragraphs. I was following every cliché. I’ve gotten away from that over the years, thank goodness. I hardly recognize my writing from back then. My work has become much more polished.

I have been fortunate to have great editors, ones who challenged me to explore and experiment with my style. My writing has become grittier, edgier, and my romantic pieces are realistic, not idealistic.

I’m content with where I am now, but every day my work is growing, changing, becoming. My style has evolved into something that fits me well, and I’m happy for that.

What was it about your genre that interested you enough to choose to write in it and not in another genre?

I’ve written in many genres, but erotica has always held my attention more than the others. I think it comes down to the challenge of it. Writing about sex, and making it believable, is much more difficult than it seems. Writing about sex and creating a story around it, where sex is a natural or necessary element, is even harder.

Those who don’t like erotica will often say that sex isn’t necessary to tell a story – I like to create stories that aren’t complete until you have the eroticism there to fuel the fire. It’s great fun, and a great challenge, to make sexuality a central and necessary part of the tale. My story “A Changing Skyline” came about like that. How could I write a tribute story, especially one about such a national tragedy, and make it sensual? If you take the sex out of that story, you lose the power of it – the sexuality is an absolutely necessary thing. It’s so much fun to write that way.

What do you find helps you when inspiration is lacking and motivation even more so?

A change of atmosphere always seems to do the trick. I once wrote 35,000 words in a week while I was out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but trees and squirrels and dirt roads and countless acres of a gorgeous lake. Taking a day trip out to the woods refreshes me. Driving into the city puts me in a different mindset. It’s always good to rattle the familiar cage into something new.

As a writer do you have any eccentric habits while writing?

I’m not sure that it is a habit, but I tend to lose myself so deeply in the story that I won’t notice if someone is in the room with me. Sometimes I don’t hear the phone ring, even though it is right there on my desk, right beside my computer. Sometimes I forget to eat or sleep. I print out things, too – obsessively. I make a hard copy every five pages or so. I do that because ultimately, I don’t trust the technology to truly save my story for me. I like the feeling of papers in my hands, the certainty that I have a record of what I have written.

What do you think is the most important piece of advice to writers trying to turn their hobbies into professions?

Don’t let up. Stay prolific. Write even when you don’t want to do so. Even if it is just writing a story based on your grocery list, about a woman wandering the aisles of the supermarket, do it. The more you write, the more you grow into the craft.

And don’t be afraid to submit! I’ve always seen rejections as opportunities to place my story elsewhere. Have the confidence that your story or novel WILL find a home, and learn to be patient with the search.

How do you market yourself, and what have your experiences in self-marketing been like?
I do everything I can to make myself accessible to my readers. I talk to bookstore owners, booksellers, clerks at used bookstores. I network with authors, with readers, with those in the publishing industry. I talk to people about the stories, the novels, the plans for the future. I have learned that nothing works as well as good, old-fashioned personal contact.

If you could assemble your fans and readers, say, in an interview, what would you like to say to them about how to improve their erotic perceptions?

No one knows what turns you on more than you do, so get to know yourself. The sensuality doesn’t come from the books. It doesn’t come from videos, toys, lingerie – all those are the trappings of bolstering an erotic life, but that is not where it is born. The sensuality comes from within. So foster it by getting to know that vixen inside. Learn what touches feel good, learn what thoughts turn you on, open your mind to anything and then decide which of those anythings is just perfect for tripping your personal triggers. Confidence is the sexiest asset you have, and once you know yourself, your confidence will flourish.

For more of your erotic/interesting scenes do you visualise them before you write them?

Oh, absolutely. What great fun that is! Sometimes I get so turned on while I’m writing, just by the visions in my head, that I have walk away from the computer to calm down. It’s been said that the largest and most powerful erogenous zone is the mind, and the more I visualize, the more sexy I feel, and the more I want to write.

The relationship dynamics that you create for your characters. Are they drawn from your own personal experience or are they more reflective of how you see couple's in society today?

It’s a bit of both, really. I certainly have written about my own experiences and my own relationships, as I did with Sex & Guitars. But others have been out of my realm of experience. For instance, when I wrote the short story “Homecoming,” it wasn’t drawn from my own personal experience. I’ve never been in a marriage that fell apart and then was built back up, like the characters in that story – but I’ve seen friends go through it, and I’ve seen them come back together when everyone else had written them off to the land of divorce. I write about all sorts of things that I have never experienced, such as a gay couple fighting to be recognized as married, or a woman seeing her husband off to war, or a man having sex for money. The basis for the stories are absolutely endless.

It's said that there is a little part of the writer in that what he/she has written. Do you agree with this? And, if so, which areas of your novels does this relate to?

It’s very hard for me to sit down and create a completely fictional piece, without any background of myself in there. I can’t help but put a bit of myself into my characters, even if it is just the emotions I’m feeling at the time. My writing style has evolved to reflect that tendency. I will work on a dozen different projects at once. Let’s say I have five or six short stories working at the same time, and I wake up in a terribly bad mood. I will instinctively turn to a story that is about anger, or loss, or someone seeking revenge. If I am in a sad kind of mood, I write a tender, sad story that might not turn out well in the end. If I’m happy, it’s a romantic kind of slant. So the characters reflect me at that given time, the emotions are real, but the story itself – the situation, the place, the actions – might be completely fictional.

With the internet there has been what I believe an increase in the amount of sexual related sites available e.g. blogs and journals. Do you feel that this has helped to liberate more women with their own sexual feelings?

I think it has certainly given women a forum to speak out about, and a place to find information that they might not have been able to obtain otherwise. Where else but the internet can you find a group of people who are readily, willingly and openly discussing anal sex? Where else can you find a group of women talking loudly about their affairs, their dissatisfactions, their discoveries of their own inner selves? These are not the kind of discussions you usually have in the back room of the public library, or even over an intimate dinner with your closest friends. The internet gives a forum for such things.

But those forums should, hopefully, foster change where it really matters. The internet allows such easy anonymity, and I wonder how many of those women move their internet world into their bedrooms? How much difference do those forums make when the computer is turned off and those women move back into their normal, everyday lives? Regardless, having a place to talk about the frustrations and the joys is priceless, and the start of something very good, very revealing, and very empowering.

And finally, what are you currently working on and what are your goals for the future?

I just finished a novel for Black Lace, which I’m incredibly excited about. It’s the tale of a woman who has been hurt very badly by a man who was always in love with someone else, and her trust and faith have been shattered. She meets a man with a taste for BDSM, and she slowly learns how trusting with your body can ultimately lead to trusting with your heart. It’s a novel about accepting our mistakes and our flaws and learning to heal despite our fears.

Currently, I’m working on a few varied projects. One is a romantic novel based in a very small town in South Carolina, where the status quo is fiercely guarded until a liberal teacher shakes things up. I’m also working on a novel about a woman who is desperate to leave her past behind, and finds allies in the most unlikely places. I’m revamping an old novella for publication, but that’s turning into more of a novel, actually. The short stories are coming along as well – right now I’m working on about a dozen different ones.

Gwen Masters is a Tennessee woman who revels in finding sensuality in everything around her. She is the author of a handful of novels and too many short stories to count, most of which have appeared in print sometime over the last dozen years. She writes songs from time to time, enjoys long autumn nights and likes her lemonade made the true southern way, with fresh lemons and just enough gin to make things interesting. For more information on Gwen and her work, visit her website: www.gwenmasters.net.

Thanks for the interview, Carrie!