David E. Guy writes short stories of a fairly erotic nature, and part of the covenant for him agreeing to be interviewed was that his real identity remains hidden behind his nom-de-plume.
Q. Would you be embarrassed if it became public knowledge that you write erotic fiction? A. Yeah, I suppose so The things I write are not things I do and it would not go down well if my family thought that I did thinks like that. Yeah, some stuff is private.
Q. Then why not write other sorts of story? A. I often do. It's that I get lots of feed back, fan sort of stuff, for my more sexy works so I stay where the fans are.
Q. How do you get the ideas for your stories? A. It varies - sometimes a news item or article in a magazine can trigger a train of thought, sometimes it comes as a person popping into my head who has a tale to be told, and it can happen that I wake up with a complete story in my head just waiting to be put on paper.
Q. Do you work out the plot first? A. Seldom - I often start with the opening people in an opening scene and just let them act out they would in real life. Even when I have a plot line, the people in the story might get to act out a different one.
Q. Are your characters based on real people. A. Not really. For instance, I have never met a sailing ship captain - so if a tale is set on a sailing ship, I draw from what I think such a person would be like. I think I might use Hollywood and stories by others to flesh out some details, but the characters tend to flesh out themselves so that the story makes sense. You can't have a criplle doing high wire trapeze walks and keep credibility going.
Q. Your characters often act in somewhat incredible ways, but they have to be credible in themselves? Yeah. All people do odd things. But they are still people.
Q. How do you come up with locations? I place people where they need to be for a tale, and simply descibe their surroundings. I suppose if they are in a house, it has to be a house that I can see - but not one that I have ever been in. The same with ships - I am not a sailor so I suspect that experts could find loads of errors in the ships that I describe.
Q. You said you sometimes wake up with a story in your head. Any ideas where they came from? A. Not really. But now that you ask, I think all of them were sequels to tales I had already published. May be it was just taking things I already knew one step further.
Q. A number of your stories are very funny, in a humorous sort of way. Where do you get your ideas for making people laugh, A. Sometimes I take a joke I know and work it into action that is amusing. Mainly I take things to extremes where it is the excess that makes people laugh, That a timid repressed librarian has feelings is the stuff of tragedy - make her rip her clothes off like in a frenzy of passion and it gets hot. Make her do it in a council meeting, and it becomes farce. And at its heart, sex is very funny if you think about it.
Q. How real to you are the people and places in your tales. A, Not very. They tend to be ciphers to be in a tale - but sometimes they seem to take on a life of their own, If they stray too far from the plot line, the rewrites get them back to where they should be,
Q. Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. A. Not a problem at all. Hope I helped.
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