Interview With Author Denis Rhyddwr
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’m a programmer, and I used to work professionally as a ghostwriter. I’ve been writing on and off since my teens; as I mentioned, there was also a period when I did it professionally.
Three years ago, I started writing regularly again, really to find an answer to one question: “What would I want to read?”
Counting what I’ve written over the last three years, that comes to five novels, six novellas/short novels, a large number of short stories, and quite a lot of bad poetry.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
Ginkgo. The idea came to me from a Ginkgo biloba tree named Johan Wolfgang von Ginkgo that appeared in an earlier novel of mine. A history of humanity seen through the eyes of trees.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
No. I only try to write while I’m asleep too, but my mind immediately wanders off and starts chasing other chains.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Tom Robbins as a whole. Kawabata—especially The Old Capital and The Sound of the Mountain—is a writer I’ve learned a great deal from technically. Most of Borges’s stories, almost everything by Tolstoy, Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, and Beckett. And if I had to choose just one writer and one book: Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a love-thriller story in which five different couples, in five different parts of the world, live through the same love under the same circumstances, but within different cultures. It’s also a metafiction in which the author is part of the narrative, and the use of the second-person singular makes the identities increasingly ambiguous.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
My web site I hope.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Yes. It’s not from me, but from Forrester, played by Sean Connery in Finding Forrester: “The first key to writing is… to write, not to think! … that comes later.”
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Mastery is the ability to see your own mistakes in your writing.
What are you reading now?
Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein. Ethics, Spinoza. The Art of Loving, Fromm.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Keep writing.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein. Ethics, Spinoza. The Art of Loving, Fromm. I haven’t finished them yet.
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