Loving this year’s One Book, One Community selection, “Carolina Moonset” by Matt Goldman? If so, how about meeting the author?
Yup. That’s right.
Goldman is making an author appearance 2 p.m. Saturday, April 20, at the McLeod County History Museum, 380 School Road NW, Hutchinson. Admission is free and the public is welcome.
To learn more about what to expect during his presentation, Matt Goldman participated in this Leader Q&A.
”Moonset Carolina” is a standalone mystery. Is it challenging or fun to step away from your Nils Shapiro series to create a new protagonist? Why or why not?
It’s mostly fun to create a new protagonist. I love series. I learned to write on a series in TV. But to create a new character with different traits, a different background, one who lives in a different place, and is surrounded by a different set of friends and foes always feels fresh and exciting.
Tell me about your writing process for “Moonset Carolina.” Do you create a detailed outline before you start writing or are you more organic in your approach? Please explain.
I never outline. I could go on and on about why not. But the short of it is, I believe the story should be created from the inside out. And the inside means characters. The story exists because of them. I know very little when I start writing my books, and “Carolina Moonset” is no exception. All I knew was there was a character with no short-term memory and excellent long-term memory.
You’re a playwright, Emmy Award-winning television writer and a published novelist. They are three separate areas under the umbrella of writing. How are the three alike and how are they different? Do you prefer one over the other? If so, why or why not?
The three areas are more similar than you’d think. Character, dialogue, relationships, and story all come from the same place and use the same skillset. The biggest difference is how much time a writer has to tell a story, and how much will it cost to produce the story. TV, film, and theater have all sorts of physical and financial restrictions. That includes the number of characters, sets, geographic locations, and special effects. In novels, those things cost nothing. And that’s why I love novel writing the best. No one tells me my story is too expensive to tell. Or that it’s impossible to produce. It costs the same amount to produce a book about intergalactic space wars as it does to produce a book about a 19th-century love affair in a quiet country village.
I don’t know anything about writing for TV. Do you have an agent who arranges work? If someone wanted to break into television writing, what would you tell them?
I do have an agent for TV. It’s difficult to get work in that field if you don’t live in LA or New York. Not impossible. But difficult. My advice, and it pains me to give it, is move to LA. That’s where you’ll meet the people who are doing it and you’ll make the connections you need once you have written a good script.
What can the audience expect from your upcoming author talk in Hutchinson?
I’ll tell a little of my story, how I became a writer and then moved from TV to novels. I’ll also talk about my upcoming books. And I’ll open it up for questions. I usually get a lot of questions because of the different mediums I’ve worked in. And there are often aspiring writers at these kinds of things and I like to answer their questions because most people, myself included, did not know any working novelists or TV writers when I grew up.
What’s next? Have you thought about writing a movie script? Or maybe you have? Is Nils Shapiro coming to a big screen or small screen in the future?
I have written movie scripts in the past and I’m not so interested in doing it now. Nils may get to TV or film, but I’m not focused on making that happen. If I really wanted him on TV, I would have written a TV script. I’m quite happy and fulfilled writing novels. If Nils makes it to the screen I won’t complain because it’ll sell more books. And if I sell books, I’ll get to keep writing them.
