Today I am posting a recent email interview I conducted with
Ashanti Luke. Ashanti studied world philosophy and religions, Creative Writing,
and Professional Writing at the University of Southern California. After living
in Los Angeles for 17 years and working in advertising and the entertainment
industry, Ashanti moved back to his hometown of Richmond, Virginia where he
worked for the US Census Bureau and as a personal trainer and tutor.
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| Ashanti Luke |
Ashanti is the author of Kindred
Spirits, Dusk and Nightfall and has had stories
publishing in Kasma Science Fiction
and in Horror, Humor, and Heroes. He
has worked as a writing instructor for Richmond’s Podium Foundation and
currently holds a position as an English professor. Ashanti currently lives in the outskirts of Richmond with
his wife and four children. He is currently researching Dusk 2: Evensong, and it should be available by the beginning of
2015. Information can be found at his website, which is an artistic showcase
for Dusk, Nightfall, and Evensong and
contains audio samples of Dusk and Nightfall.
Here's the interview:
· Who are your
influences?
Octavia Butler,
Orson Scott Card, and Philip K Dick are my main sci-fi influences, but my writing
also has heavy influence from Hong Kong Cinema, particularly old John Wu and
Tsui Hark as well as stage plays like Les
Miserables, Pinter’s Betrayal,
and just about anything Tom Stoppard or David Mamet.
· When did you
begin writing?
I began writing
when I was young, and I began outlining my first novel when I was 16, and I
began drafting it when I was 19. I went to graduate school for writing, so I
completed that novel (Kindred Spirits) for my thesis. My household, however,
was inundated with storytelling as my mother was both an elementary school
reading teacher and a professional storyteller.
· How do you come
up with your stories, characters, character names, POV, etc?
Many times I
begin with a ‘what if’ or an interesting idea, and then I begin to build
characters around that idea. I feel very strongly that the characters should
make the story happen, and often the backgrounds for my characters come about
because I need characters that would find themselves in (and often eventually out
of) the situations that are put before them. I feel like any good story is
character driven, and the more complicated the plot is, the more, let’s say
‘particular’ the characters have to be. I often say the more characters I am
working with, the more real friends get ignored.
As far as names go, I like the names of the characters to
have some outside meaning without being obtrusive or necessary to the story. My
characters also have various ethnic and national backgrounds, so many times
their names are reflective of those backgrounds, or function as a part of their
personal progression before we meet them in the story. As an example, in the
story Aiwass in Nightfall, Johan Roeland DeGraaf is a Dutch Canadian who, in 1904
is a detective in the Providence, Rhode Island constabulary. He is charged with
rescuing 14-year old H.P. Lovecraft from mysterious kidnappers, and because of
the events of the story, becomes the inspiration for Inspector John Raymond
Legrasse in Call of Cthulhu.
· Do you work from
an outline?
I work from an
outline, but the average person would need the Rosetta Stone and an Orphan
Annie decoder ring to make sense of most of my outlines. I tend to jot ideas
down and pile ever more detailed information into the document until the story itself
coalesces around it or it osmoses into a second document where I begin writing.
It is a very organic, but necessary, process for me.
· Tell me about
your favorite scene in your novel.
There are so
many scenes is Nightfall, but I would
say my favorite scene in the collection is when Mori Mak, a young high school
girl who delivers pizzas to support both herself and her alcoholic father
fights off two would-be muggers using a martial arts training that is as lethal
as it is colorful and unlikely.
· Can you tell us
a little about your writing philosophy?
As I mentioned
before, I feel characters should always drive the narrative. I also believe in
adding deeper meaning to the stories, but having that meaning not get in the
way of the accessibility and ubiquitous humanity of the tale. I also believe
very strongly in research. Good research and good characters can make even the
most unlikely story seem believable.
· Have you ever
tried writing in any other genres?
Kindred Spirits is arguably a suspense
thriller with science fiction elements. I tend to mix staples of other genres
into science-fiction because I also believe that science fiction should
ultimately be about humanity or the human condition. In that way, nothing that
touches the human heart and elicits an emotion is off-limits. Nightfall contains a wide range of story
types all under the veil of science fiction, and all with some relationship to
the timeline and events in my novel Dusk,
which is the first book of a trilogy. It is completely unnecessary to know the
events in Dusk, but Nightfall and Dusk complement each other, and the stories in Nightfall lend insight to many of the themes, events, and
characters in Dusk, as well as those
that are forthcoming. I suppose the short version is even though I am a science
fiction author, the science fiction I write is enhanced, I believe, by elements from many different genres.
· Do you have any
interesting writing-related anecdotes to share?
One thing that
is interesting, I think, is that Dusk
began as an idea for a short story. As I began delving into the motivations of
the characters, however, the story began to expand. As more characters were
introduced, various other motivations increased the story to novel-length.
There was one final motivation that brought about, quite literally, the end of
the world, and expanded the scope of the overall idea to a trilogy. The concept
for Nightfall came from the idea that
there were so many stories to be told from different perspectives of human
experience within the timeline and universe of Dusk that it was easy to create ‘one-off’ stories that were
self-contained, but benefited from the overall richness and detail of the world
without the world itself overwhelming the narrative. At the end of it all, I
would like to write a fictitious history textbook that details all of the
events of the full narrative in the same manner as real textbooks catalogue our
history. I think it would be fun for both myself and readers.
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