When my first novel was published in 2013,
all I knew was that I wanted to tell stories for a living. I’d grown up seeing Stephen King, Ray
Bradbury and Anne Rice do it, and, having gotten paid $25 for the publication
of a short story in Scholastic magazine
when I was still in middle school, I’d had a little taste of doing it
myself. But I had the idea that what my
readers were most interested in was the story I was telling, and that they
didn’t really care about ‘the man behind the curtain.’
In today’s literary world, that kind of
thinking is wrong.
Readers today are inundated with choices
and competition for their attention, and for their money. If you’re a new author today, taking your
first steps into the publishing marketplace, you’re competing not only with
thousands of already-established authors, many of whom have best-selling
reputations, but also with word-of-mouth and Internet buzz about other new
writers as well.
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How do you, as the new kid on the writing
block, get noticed amidst the crowd? The
answer ties back into my realization that readers want to connect with an
author as much as they want to connect with the story that author is
telling. And if an author can find a way
to connect his or her individual narrative as a person with the narratives he
or she puts down on paper, so much the better.
As my career as a novelist evolved, I began
to look at the connecting thematic tissue between my life and the lives and
challenges of the people in my stories. Annah,
the young woman from a distant world who is the heroine of the Children of Evohe books, shares both my
upbringing as an only child and the social situation I grew up with: she is a
young person with both disabilities and ideas that many people in her community
see as strange. Annah’s struggle for
identity and her discovery of a special purpose for her life mirror my own
adolescence and early adulthood, and it was, in many ways, my discovery of my
abilities as a writer that allowed me to forge that identity for myself, in the
same way Annah’s discovery of her particular gifts allows her to do the
same. Annah’s human mate, Gary Holder,
shares my own disability, having been born hydrocephalic. A number of other characters in the series
have challenges of their own.
Now, I’ve realized that nearly all of my
stories draw on the experience of someone who comes at life from a perspective
on the fringes, either because of worldview or disability or both. I’ve also used my own experiences and
relationships in my life to inform and inspire my stories, but the ‘hook’ of
overcoming challenges and disabilities—a very real and human struggle many
people can relate to—against the fantastical background of other worlds or
supernatural situations is what seems to make a story a ‘Clay Gilbert’
story. My stories are about forging
understanding between people with differences, and achieving victory over
personal obstacles and setbacks. It’s
something genuine from my own life that blends well with my also-genuine love
for genre fiction to make what I hope is a successful literary blend.
It’s a pattern, but not a formula, because
the people in my stories—forgive me if I don’t really like to call them
‘characters’—are distinct from one another.
Annah is not the same girl as Cassie Edwards, the young woman who
contracts the HIV virus from a blood transfusion in my novel Dark Road to Paradise, only to be
offered a way out of certain death when she discovers the young English teacher,
Martin Cabot, whom she’s been dating is in fact a vampire. And yet the outsider perspective remains, for
both Martin and Cassie, and Martin’s vampiric nature is, in some ways, as much
of a ‘disease of the blood’ as Cassie’s own condition.
Find a way to tell your story through the
lives of your characters, and also to reach out to your readers through blogs,
interviews, and personal appearances. If
you can make your stories personal to the people who read them, they’ll feel
connected to you—and that will separate you from every other name on every
other book they might pick up.
Clay Gilbert has been hearing the voices of
aliens, vampires, and people from the future since about the age of four. It wasn't long before he started to think
taking notes on what they said might be a good idea. This has led him many places—through the
halls and classrooms of many schools, where he's been both in front of the
teacher's desk and behind it, himself—to presenter's podiums at conventions,
and, most often, to the comfortable chair behind his writing desk at home,
where he uses his Dell computer as both a beacon and a translator for the
voices that still find their way through from countless worlds and planes of
existence. Clay’s work in various genres has been in print since his first
short science fiction story, “The Computer Conspiracy,” was published in Scholastic magazine when he was just
thirteen. He holds an M.A. in English literature from Auburn
University , and an M.F.A. in Fiction
Writing from the University
of South Carolina Dark Road Paradise .
His works are published by Dark Moon Press. His current projects include an urban fantasy
novel called The Kind, as well as Cassie’s Song, a sequel to Dark
Road to Paradise, and a standalone science fiction novel set in the
universe of the Children of Evohe
series, called The Conversationalist. He
has also served as the Chief Editor for PDMI Publishing, and has been a member
of the volunteer staff for DragonCon in Atlanta ,
Georgia Knoxville , TN.
