Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

"Greg Saloga glanced at the inert and writhing bodies around him and fell to his knees, letting out the most primal wail anyone had heard in a couple hundred thousand years. He covered his face and screamed into his hands, 'Why must I ... hurt?'" 

That's a dispatch from Larry Doyle's topsy-turvey high school novel, I Love You, Beth Cooper--where everybody, including the school bully, has an 80's-teenage-movie-style epiphany.

Doyle has written for The New Yorker, The Simpsons, and HBO. Today, he's sharing some of his novel research and character design secrets with us.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog:
Who are the writers that inspire you? What are the writing resources,
websites, and tools you use?

Larry Doyle:
Writers I have stolen from: Charles Portis, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon. Click here to continue reading...

I used to hoard reference books (I have a few thousand, including books on Opera and Calculus I have never used) but now I do almost all my research online.

I have thousands of bookmarks in various categories, and I usually create a new category for each project and add links as I go along.  For "I Love You, Beth Cooper," I relied heavily on Google, Wikipedia and IMDB.

I also use the Social Security name database when picking names, so I know that the name I pick was somewhat in use when the character was born.