SIX QUESTIONS WITH AUTHOR DANIEL KEYS MORAN
Talking 'Bout Writing With Writers
"Daniel Keys Moran is an enterprise architect, writer, and speaker. He has designed for some of the largest websites in the world, including Mindbody, RealtyTrac, Yahoo Music, and MySpace, and has consulted for VISA, Amgen, and L.A. Care. His classic SF novel "The Long Run" is one of the highest-rated novels of any genre on Goodreads. His stories about Boba Fett appear in the best-selling SF anthologies of all time, and his Star Trek: Deep Space Nine story "Hard Time" is one of the best-regarded episodes of all Star Trek, ranked #17 out of over 700 Star Trek episodes by Playboy Magazine. He coined the word "webcast" and was the first person to describe internet addiction in print. He has performed commentary on NPR on subjects as diverse as new treatments for blindness, space travel, the interstate highway system, and the Pony Express; addressed the students of Singularity University on gene refactoring; and spoken at the International Space Development Conference on the prospects for the long term survival of the human race."
SIX QUESTIONS
1 - Which writer who came before, do you admire the most?
Probably Larry McMurtry. "Lonesome Dove" is the finest novel I've ever read -- won the Pulitzer Prize, which for a Western is astonishing. If I had to pick a body of work, Travis McGee by John D MacDonald. The thing about both those writers is they write in a style that I think I can compete in. I'm not saying I'm as good as them, I'm not and probably never will be -- never say never, of course. Ambition is a virtue in artists. The writer I have most enjoyed reading, who I know has chops I could never approach? Ursula K Le Guin.
2 - Which teacher(s) had the most profound effect on you?
I dropped out of high school after the tenth grade. No one comes to mind in that arena. Men who taught me things worth knowing outside of school?
My Dad, Steven Barnes, David Gerrold.
3 - Besides writing, what’s your favorite hobby or passion?
“You Yankees are so silly About matters of the heart Don't you know that women Are the only work of art” -- Don Henley, Driving With Your Eyes Closed
That's when I was younger.
But basketball was a close second even then, and as I near 60, I spend more time on basketball than on contemplating women. That would have been a shock to young Danny.
4 - What is something that those who don’t write fiction do not know or understand about it?
First, it's work. Dull, grinding work. Second, if you don't have mood swings before you become a writer, you will afterwards.
People will praise you for work you did years or decades earlier, while the work that you are doing at the moment is unnoticeable, because you're sitting in a room by yourself while you do it. When that work is finally done and in front of the public, you're already distant from it. Humans are designed to work and get praise, but not with such severe time gaps between the work and praise.
5 - Can you think of a key breakthrough moment in your work, for you, that you’d be willing to share?
Less is more; don't hold anything back.
On the first, this is Gregory Mcdonald: "I work very hard at being simple. By the time a person is 18 years old today, he has seen 21,000 hours of film at 24 frames per second, and he has just incredible images already built into his consciousness or unconsciousness.
Back when Sir Walter Scott was working, he was writing for people who hadn’t been 50 miles from their houses. So if he was describing a street in Edinburgh, let alone Paris, he’d have to describe what was going on and what everyone was doing. Now, unless you are writing about something really exotic, you have this incredible bank on which to draw.
Where Sir Walter Scott used 7,000 words, I can get it down to seven by conjuring the images that are already there." Second, artists are prone to saving a great idea for later. Don't. Use it now. While it's fresh.
Trust in your creativity. More will come when it's needed.
6 - What’s next for you?
Youngest boy just moved out of the house. My wife and I are packing and moving into a camper and cruising California to go look for land to build a large house on, something large enough from my five children to visit all at the same time.
Or did you mean writing? Having the children gone has freed up a lot of time. I don't know if I will ever be able to be a full-time writer, but I expect my productivity to increase. I am 250 pages into a new novel set in the same universe as my earlier novels, but a thousand years later.
It's the first completely new work I've done in decades. I'm really loving it.