Favourite Questions From Recent Interviews: Sharon Stogner Asks About Being Nominated For Awards
Recently, The Gathering Of The Lost was shortlisted for the David Gemmell Legend Award, and as a finalist I was interviewed on a number of fora around the traps.
I was asked a number of great questions so thought I’d share a few of them—plus my answers, of course!—here on the blog over the next few weeks.
Sharon Stogner, of the ismellsheep genre site, asked a great question about what awards mean. Here it is:
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“Sharon: The Heir of Night … won the Gemmell Morningstar, and now The Gathering of the Lost has been nominated for the Gemmell Legend. How does this feel as an author?
Helen: You know, I do sometimes reflect on the relationship between writing and awards and ‘why they matter.’ Arguably, at one level they don’t, because the reason I write—and I imagine it’s pretty much the same for other authors—is because of the delight of storytelling, and because the stories are just there “in the air” and demand to be told. And sometimes you get the occasional ‘message in a bottle’ that lets you know you have connected with a reader; that he or she loved your story, which is what it’s all about.
Yet when I found out I had won the Morningstar it was just such a buzz, not just knowing “my story” had won an international award, but realizing people I had never met must have cared enough to vote for it.
And because writing is essentially a very solitary occupation–I sometimes refer to it as ‘the loneliness of the long distance writer’— winning an award like the Morningstar is a tremendous affirmation that you are, through those solitary scribblings, connecting with people around the planet. It’s the ‘message in a bottle’ scaled up a hundredfold, which is amazingly motivational and humbling at one and the same time!…”