BENJAMIN LUDWIG

Interview with Benjamin Ludwig

Benjamin Ludwig is the author of GINNY MOON, published by Park Row Books of HarperCollins on May 02, 2017. To date it has been published in eighteen countries. His novella, SOURDOUGH, was the recipient of the 2013 Clay Reynolds Prize for the Novella. A former English teacher and new-teacher mentor, he holds an MAT in English education and an MFA in creative writing. He and his family live in New Hampshire.

What are you reading right now?
 

Right now I’m reading a book called FIFTEEN DOGS by Andre Alexis. It’s a great book, one that I hope people will pick up and devour. The pitch totally hooked me as soon as I heard it: “And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto vet­erinary clinic.” I’m always interested in books about dogs, and this was utterly tragicomic. I’m reading it for the second time, now. I like to read deeply rather than broadly – there are several books that I re-read every year, and I think this might end up being one of them.

What first sparked your interest in writing? 

I caught the writing-bug in third grade, the same year I fell in love with writing. I wanted to impress a girl who happened to be a bookworm, so I picked out a copy of the same book she was reading, sat next to her, and tried to strike up a conversation. She completely ignored me. So I started reading the book…and fell in love with Laura Ingalls Wilder. My buddies weren’t impressed, but I was enthralled. Soon after, I started writing my own stories, most of which were about a family of raccoons crossing a dangerous meadow. They had a pet squirrel named Jack, as I recall.

What do you love the most about writing? The least?

The constant surprise. Most of the time, when I think I know what’s going to happen next, my characters end up surprising me. Ginny was like that. I made an outline to guide me through the writing process, but she refused to follow it. She had her own ideas about how things should go. It was all I could do to keep up with her.

Tell us a little about your writing process.

I write in two places. In the morning before the kids are up, I write on the couch, with the woodstove burning, and the dogs sprawled out nearby. During the day, when everyone is at school or work, I write at the dining room table so that I can spread out all my notes, outlines, and papers. Most of my revision and planning takes place during the day because I can get to at all the things I need without worrying about waking up the rest of the family. My mornings, though, are for purely creative work.

What are your passions?

Aside from writing? I love chopping wood, and gardening, and being outside. Hiking has always been a favorite activity.

What inspires you?

Poetry and music. Or maybe I should say music and poetry. The playfulness of structure, which I find easiest to perceive in those two things. Creativity has always been, for me, about setting up expectations, and then thwarting them in clever ways. That’s what music and poetry do, I think.

Ginny has such a distinct voice and perspective. Did it take a while to get that right or did her voice come to you from the start? 

Ginny’s voice came to me in a very mysterious, exciting way. I came home one night in 2013 from my daughter’s Special Olympics basketball practice with a voice ringing in my ears. It wasn’t my daughter’s voice, and it wasn’t the voice of any of the other kids I’d just been talking with at practice.  It was a desperate, quirky, driving voice – one that demanded to be written. So I sat and I wrote, and immediately saw that I had something beyond exciting. After that I wrote out an outline – but Ginny refused to do what the outline said. And thank goodness! Her direction proved to be much better. 

Did Ginny’s character require much research or did you write her more from empathy? 

I didn’t do any research at all, for Ginny as a character. Her voice made the character, if that makes sense. What she said, and how she said it, suggested a lot of the backstory, and pointed directly to some of her disabilities.

What made you decide on short chapters or is that simply what felt natural for this book?

I think Ginny’s own direct, to-the-point style demanded that the chapters be short. There were times when I tried to make some of the chapters longer, but she found my attempts to be (as she would put it) tedious.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Cultivate your ideas, and take them seriously. Human beings have creative thoughts all the time, but it’s so, so it’s easy to breeze past them, and to say, “That’s just a silly idea.”  The hardest thing for a new writer to do is to accept that a lot of their ideas can and should be developed. We sell ourselves short, I think, and underestimate ourselves all the time.