D.W. Richards is a member of the Canadian Authors Association, and beyond being a novelist, he is also a script doctor and freelance writer. An excerpt from Pairs appeared in the October 2010 issue of the international literary PDF quarterly Cantarville as a standalone fiction piece. In addition to creative writing, D.W. Richards has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Carleton University and is a certified general accountant. He divides his time between Venice, Italy, and Ottawa, Canada.
Q. Thank you for this interview, David. Can we begin by having you tell us why you chose to write women’s fiction?
More or less, it chose me. I simply wrote the kind of story that I’d like to read and for the sake of being able to succinctly promote the resulting novel, I needed to pick the genre that best fit. I enjoy writing female characters, and I am fortunate to have a dozen or so women in my life that don’t mind reading drafts to ensure that the characters, if perhaps outrageous and eccentric, do ring true.
Q. Did you outline before you wrote your book or did you just go with the flow?
I had a general sense of the story in my mind before I began, and as I wrote, I had a rolling outline that constantly sketched out the next few upcoming chapters. For chapters near at hand, I would have details of events and for those further down the line I might only have a single jot note summarizing what I want to achieve.
Q. Who was your favorite character in Pairs and why?
Alexandra is my favourite, for several reasons. Childlike yet pragmatic, she is a person of extremes that is at once the quirkiest, the most complex, and the least predictable of the characters. The reader learns of her naïve gentleness yet also sees hints of the powerful, fierce, and decisive aspects to her nature. I also might be biased in my selection because I am aware of her role in a larger storyline of which Pairs is the beginning.
Q. Who was your least favorite character?
I don’t leap as readily to the answer for this question, but Adam. I enjoyed writing this very solid and stable guy, but I prefer character’s that are quirky, or, as in Alexandra’s case, even outrageous. Among his other roles within the narrative he plays, in some ways, the mediator to the reader as he reacts to the antics and eccentricities of the other characters.
