Anthony Beal

The greatest joy of writing for me is to populate my story settings with characters that are multi-dimensional, flawed, and most importantly, that react to the events of the story in a believable fashion. Oftentimes, regardless of story genre in which an author is writing, characters get so poorly written that it distracts from the tale being told. Examples of this would be characters portrayed as cartoonishly evil for no discernible reason or ones with no clear motivation driving his/her actions, or who exists only to embody one or more all-too-familiar tropes and clichés that are usually even less entertaining to read about in print than they are to watch in films. I like to give my characters fears, doubts, anxieties; imperfections we can all relate to. Sometimes I allow them to be completely wrongheaded in their way of thinking. I like to let them try to reason out solutions to their problems, or maybe fret a while and wonder what in hell to do about their situation. I like them to dream and stumble and lust and despair and make wrong guesses and resist change and be brave and be cowards, to behave like we all do sometimes. Also, sometimes I like to have them simply fail. But I try to always make them interesting, if only to me. That’s my joy as a writer.

My fans mean constant evolution to me, because having received positive feedback from people drives me to want to sustain their interest. It drives me to continue challenging myself to tell new stories in new settings. It pushes me to experiment with language and characterization in ways I haven’t tried before, but that I hope my fans will enjoy as much as they’ve enjoyed my past works. That shouldn’t suggest that this desire to see my style always evolving isn’t an inherent part of me as a writer, because it is. Certainly any artist, writer or otherwise, mustn’t rely solely on external motivations in order to create and produce; the motivation has to come first from within. But knowing there are people out there enjoying what I do sure makes it a bit more enjoyable. And each fan’s opinion is worth more to me that two dozen negative comebacks. I’m all for a writer being able to take constructive criticism and am always grateful when I receive some, but obviously not all criticism is constructive; especially in the internet age, there are people who simply enjoy spreading negativity behind the veil of relative anonymity that an online avatar affords. I’ll gladly thank a person for a constructive, helpful critique, but what I don’t have time or patience for is someone simply spewing insults at writers who for better or worse, dared to put their most personal imaginings on display, so I tend to ignore such cruel individuals. Why waste time with people whose only purpose in commenting on my work was to antagonize me, when I could be talking to my fans instead?