Today a I spoke to author, Olga Godim.
Follow her journey from the first sparks of inspiration for her writing and see what Olga is working on now!
What
was the thing that influenced you to start writing?
I
became a writer pretty late in life. By education, I’m a computer programmer. I
worked with computers for three decades. I’m also a daydreamer. Since I
remember myself, I always made up stories and played them in my head, like a
one-woman theatre, but I never told anyone about my daydreams. They were my
secret, and I didn’t write them down. To tell the truth, I was a bit embarrassed,
afraid of ridicule. I was a serious professional woman, a single mom with two
children. I never thought I could be a writer but I couldn’t get rid of my daydreams.
They felt like a vestige from my childhood. And like a child, I loved my
dream-world’s heroes and heroines. Sometimes, they felt more alive and precious
to me than the living people around me.
As
my children grew up, I grew dissatisfied with my computer job. Then, in 2002, I
got breast cancer. Obviously, my case was successful, but during the long
recovery months, my daydreams became more persistent. They swarmed me, they
wanted to be told. So I decided to be brave, stop resisting, and at last let my
daydreams out. Cancer has that effect on some people. I started writing a
story, the first writing I did since high school. I didn’t know if it was a
short story or a novel. I didn’t know anything about publishing. I just wanted
to write.
Everyone
in my family was flabbergasted: they hadn’t known about my daydreams. But I
didn’t care. Writing liberated me. I felt like I finally woke up from a long
hibernation, free to explore my stories and myself. I felt happy.
I
also discovered that I didn’t know how to write, how to translate my daydreams
into the written words, plot, conflict, and characters. It took me years to
learn: I read writing textbooks, took classes, enrolled in workshops. I’m still
in the process, still learning. I don’t think I’ll ever stop: there is so much
to learn.
Tell me your success stories in terms of publishing/self publishing
Success
stories? You know, I’ve done several interviews by now, and nobody asked this
question. So I went to my tracking database and counted. Here are some stats:
Published
newspaper articles (since 2007) –
186
Published
short stories (in various online and print magazines) – 18
Published
novels –
1
Written
novels (finished and unfinished) –
7
I’m
also in conversation with a publisher for my second novel. I hope the contract
will follow soon.
And
all of the above in 10 years. It’s not an instant fame but a gradual build up
on a very steep slope. And I enjoyed every step, which is a success story of
its own.
What are your top writing tips for any aspiring writer?
I
have a favourite quote – my motto in writing:
“Success
seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.”
―
William Feather
That
would be my advice to any aspiring writer. Persevere. Don’t give up. If one
route to publication doesn’t work out, try another. If nobody wants your novel,
try to write for a newspaper or a magazine, even if they don’t pay. Blogs don’t
count; your friends are already reading your blog. You need to find readership
that don’t know you. You need to convince people who are not interested that
what you write could be interesting for them. And write, write, write.
A
writer friend I met online once said: you can only consider yourself a
professional writer after
you’ve
written one million words or more. It’s true. An average novel is about 60,000
to 100,000 words. If I toss in all the writing and re-writing I’ve done for all
the short stories and novels, plus my newspaper articles (I’ve been writing for
a local newspaper for over five years), I’m somewhat over one million mark now.
And I finally got a novel published in February.
Self-publishing
doesn’t count either. Most self-published novels I’ve read are amateur and
badly edited. I understand the urge of many first-time writers to get their
beloved story in front of the readers. But writing is a long process, and you
can’t skip the apprenticeship phase. Skills come from years of practice, like
in music. Of course there are exceptions, but they only underscore the rule: instant
gratification doesn’t exist for writers. Your first novel isn’t good, believe
me. My first novel was terrible. It’s still hidden in the bowels of my computer
hard drive. It will never be published, although I have revised it at least ten
times. It was my school. Your first novel is your school. Don’t publish it.
Learn from it and move on.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a
novel which is part of a fantasy series. The heroine is a young and very
powerful magician. In the story, she finds herself in a foreign kingdom, where
female magic is anathema. The acolytes of the local god, all men, confine any
witch or sorceress they can find to a ‘nunnery’, where they suck the magic out
of the women with a special spell and use that magic for their own purposes.
My heroine is in this
kingdom in secret, at the request of her queen. She is not in danger from the
local god or his monks, but she is very angry at the plight of the local female
mages? Should she interfere? Try to help the poor, abused witches? Or should
she maintain her incognito status, complete her assignment for the queen, and
leave. If she interferes, she might cause a diplomatic incident, maybe even a
war, between their two kingdoms. If she does nothing, the imprisoned witches
will continue to suffer. The choice she faces isn’t nice or easy.
What do you draw on for inspiration?
My
inspiration comes from different sources. Sometimes, a book I read or a TV show
sparks an idea: I want to explore what could happen if a different hero, one of
my own, got into a situation the author describes. Or if the same situation was
transferred to a different genre: let’s say from a modern day police procedural
to a medieval fantasy. Could they use magic instead of DNA and fingerprints? Sometimes
certain events of my life or my friends’ lives prompt new stories. That
happened with “Lost and Found in Russia”. Mostly the book came from my daydreams, my
personal experience, and the people I met.
Please tell me anything else you’d like the reader to know about you
Many
writers admit that they dislike revising, but I love revising and editing as
much as I like writing the first draft, maybe more, and that was a big surprise
for me. When I write the first draft, I’m in a rush. I use the first word that
comes into my mind just to get my idea across. But when I revise, I play with
words and expressions, search for the best ones, use a thesaurus, juggle
paragraphs. I love that process, even deleting pieces, when it improves the
story. It feels like I’m a gourmet at a feast of words. I rejoice in every
word, every clever turn of phrase. I add a pinch of this and a dollop of that,
and the resulting brew becomes better.
Although
I must confess, I keep everything I delete. Sometimes, I reuse those snippets
of text in another story. I’m a hoarder, I don’t discard anything.
Another
tidbit: I use a pen name for fiction – Olga Godim. My newspaper articles all
have a different byline. When I started submitting my first fantasy stories to
magazines, I was still working at my computer job and I felt slightly
embarrassed by my fantastic tales. Women of my age and profession didn’t
entertain themselves with magic and fairy tales. Or so I thought. So I decided
to use a pseudonym. Olga is my first name, and Godim was my father’s first
name. He died before I published my first piece, before I even started thinking
about writing, but I wanted him to be a part of my writing life, so I chose his
name as my nom de plume. Now, he’s always with me, a witness to my
successes and failures as a writer. And I think the name sounds good, like a
small cheerful bell.
Thank you so much Olga and the best of luck with Lost and Found in Russia!
Olga writes for a blog called Silkscreen Views to read it just
click here!
To find out more about Lost and Found in Russia and how to purchase
just click here! and
here! and
here!
