Lou Aronica

 I’m a guy and I write love stories. As it turns out, not all that many other guys do this. Some romance writers with female names are actually men (I’m sure Jerry Springer has found a tawdry way to spin this at some point). Some men include great love stories in novel...

Writing fiction is a form of wish fulfillment. Writing is such an immersive process that one of the byproducts is that the writer is immersed in the world he or she creates. I don’t believe there’s any way to write fiction honestly unless you are capable of and willing...

My novel The Journey Home has multiple inspirations. The strongest of these was the romance between my mother and father that lasted more than six decades. I’ve been trying for years to come up with a story that captured the spirit of their relationship, and I’m hoping...

Writing fiction isn’t like competing in the Olympics in terribly many ways. This is, for the most part, a good thing, as my training regimen falls a tiny bit short of Olympic standards (actually, it’s just this side of couch potato standards). One way in which they’re...

The very first book I ever edited – David Brin’s Startide Rising – won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. My batting average has plummeted since. In reality, I never planned to be an editor at all. Publishing was in fact my second choice of profession. I wanted to be a t...

Early in my publishing career, I worked with a vaunted science fiction writer, one of the true masters of the field. His books consistently sold well, but then he published a book that sold in an outsized way. He’d always written novels that stood alone, so the repeate...

Many years ago, I read an article that John Irving wrote for the New York Times Book Review. In it, he defended the novelist’s use of sentimental passages if they were intrinsic to the story and not contrived purely to generate an emotional response from the reader. Hi...

I’ve always been suspicious of films that purported to be “based on a true story.” That seems like a huge cheat to me. You get the advantage of viewers marveling that what they’re watching really happened while getting to change absolutely anything you want. When I sta...

This is another song that came from my "situation drama" approach of considering a circumstance and then imagining how it would play out. In this case, I wanted to write a song about long-distance relationships, so I threw my narrator into that situation, even though I...