Fenice meets... Isaac Marion #2 English Version

 

the Italian cover

First of all, I need to tell you all that it's an honour for me having Isaac Marion here, on my blog. I really liked “Warm Bodies” and it was a wonderful surprise discover that, the author who wrote it, is such a nice and deep person.So... Thank you Isaac for this interview (and sorry for my english guys, but I have to practise a little bit more...!=)
Enjoy!Elena
Where did you find the inspiration for Warm Bodies? What gave you the initial spark?
It began its life as a short story which was just a couple scenes of a zombie talking about his life in the apocalypse. I just thought it would be fascinating to get inside the mind of a creature like that, to imagine what kind of thoughts he would have if he had any. When I decided to expand it into a novel, much more complex ideas came into play, and it became more about the deeper personal implications of living in such a condition. What would happen if a zombie realized what he was, and decided he wanted to change? That was the basic premise.
I like the way Warm Bodies is written. Reading it, is like listen to a song. Words are just going with the flow without anything to stop them: sometimes the stream is powerful other times is just peaceful and calm. You can't stop reading it because you want to know how the story is going on, feeling all the emotions the caracters are experiencing and standing next to them, into the story. But how would you define your way of writing? Is there an author who particularly influenced your style?
I think you defined it pretty well there. I'm a musician so writing words that have a certain rhythmic flow to them (song lyrics) comes pretty naturally to me. I reread my stuff over and over again trying to iron out any awkward kinks in the flow of a paragraph or even a chapter. I try to vary the sentence lengths and structures so that it never sounds too choppy or too droning. I guess they call that type of writing "lyrical", and most of my favorite authors do write that way at least some of the time. I don't know if I could identify which authors actually influenced my style into what it is today, but Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and Paul Harding's "Tinkers" might exemplify the kind of writing I aspire to do, although I tend to be somewhat less flowery and a little more accessible.
In Warm Bodies music is really important: it's a way to comunicate. It provides words and concepts otherwise it's hard to express. Is music important in your life?
Oh definitely. I get a lot of my best story ideas from little fragments of lyrics that jump out at me in a song, or from the mood of the song itself. I always write with music in the background, chosen specifically for the type of mood I want to create in the scene I'm writing. Not to mention, I'm a musician myself and I think there's a lot of crossover between my writing and my music. (My last album was called "Dead Children" and could be seen as a companion album to Warm Bodies. You can download it for free at isaacmarion.bandcamp.com) I find myself not seeking out new music as obsessively as I did when I was younger, which is a little alarming to me (Julie admonishes R for the same thing in Warm Bodies) but it's still a big part of my daily life.
I love R. He is a strong character full of life, even if he is a zombie, a not completely dead guy whose body is decomposing day after day. Why have you chosen to talk about the importance of life through death?
As the saying goes, "you don't know what you've got till it's gone." I think it's easy to take life for granted when you still have access to it whenever you want. You can keep putting things off day after day, tell yourself, "Yeah, I'll learn an instrument and travel the world and fall in love eventually...just not right now." Seeing the world through the eyes of a corpse who's had his identity and memories stripped away from him, who has lost all traces of his human experience, is a good way to examine how precious--and URGENT--those things really are.
Love is the key to fight against the zombie virus, giving to all the infected the chance to come back to life again. Do you think love is the right answer to a world full of rage, violence, and hate like the one we are living in? Can love give us the opportunity to save our world and our souls?
If you use "love" in the broadest sense of the word, yes. I certainly don't think romantic love can save the world. But if "love" means empathy and compassion, and a hunger and passion to create an extraordinary life for yourself and others, yes, I think that can help. So much of our civilization is based on these animalistic ideals that evolved in primitive times when they were necessary to survive. We've come so far as a species, we're the only animal that can aspire toward things much higher than survival and reproduction, we're capable of breaking through these walls and transforming the world into something amazing, but those primitive tribalistic ideas still dominate most of the world, forcing people's focus and priorities onto things that don't matter as much as we think. The world could be so much better than it is if these simpler, purer goals could ever become the dominant paradigm instead of being confined to a few lofty thinkers.