Back to Featured Interviews >>

MEET BLAZE GINSBERG
by Bonnie O'Brian

What did you like to do when you were a child?

Blaze Ginsberg

I started going to school when I was five years old.  I did not really interact/socialize with other students at school very much because I really didn’t like school that much and was very, very shy.  So I really just liked to watch kid’s shows on PBS such as The Magic School Bus, The Puzzle Place, The Big Comfy Couch and Sesame Street.  And later I liked to sing songs and play a guitar I got as a gift when I was about nine.

Did you write stories when you were growing up? At school? Or at home as a hobby? As a young child, or as a teenager, or both?

The first ever story I really wrote was when I was in third grade about a turkey who catches on fire and then gets eaten.   At home I did write a lot of songs and poems but also remakes of Disney movies I had seen.  But then I started writing about stuff that was in my own mind.  In high school (freshman year) I also wrote a lot of stories; all from my own ideas.  It was always my hobby to write stories. I have had a fairly unique early life experience. I did not interact with friends that much for a variety of reasons and I didn’t play sports or a musical instrument in elementary school. In early 2008, when I was only twenty years old, I got a deal for a book which I have heard is super rare for someone my age. So that is also unique.

When you went to college were you already pursuing a writing career?

I started college in 2006.  At that point I was in the early stages of writing my memoir, EPISODES. But I had already started writing it.  At this point writing was a bit of a challenge for me because I had then also started to practice college writing and that was the most difficult.  It was made even harder when my English professor did not believe me when I said that I was doing my own writing when I couldn’t answer certain questions about bits and pieces of my papers.  I had to do thesis statements and narrative essays and they were really hard because they ask a lot of questions about certain topics. Creative writing has always been much easier for me because it has fewer rules. But nowadays I am pretty good at college writing. So basically when I started college I was getting serious about a writing career.

How soon after that was your first book published?

I am still attending college today.  My book will be published in less than three months. My memoir was sold in mid-freshman year of college.   That’s when I got my agent and we discussed the book a lot. I was very, very excited about publishing a book.  But at the same time school was still a major struggle.

Do you focus on fiction or nonfiction? Which do you prefer? Do you find one easier than the other?

I mostly write fiction, although my book is a memoir, which is nonfiction.  I wrote a few nonfiction pieces in high school about things that had happened when I was younger and about things that were going on with friends at school. At that point, my nonfiction was not a narrative, it was mostly quotes from people and then a little description. These incidents included quotes from the first time I was getting ready to go to a movie theater to see Walt Disney’s Beauty And The Beast when I was four years old, in 1991:
My Grandpa: “You have to sit in your seat.”
And one time when a bee flew into our house:
My Mom: “A bee flew in here!”
I actually prefer nonfiction even though I write a lot of fictional stories.  I like writing nonfiction because I find it very exciting and interesting and I get to partially relive the certain event I am writing about as I do in my memoir.  I find nonfiction to be really easy because it doesn’t really require a whole lot of thinking and it’s really a lot of fun.

What really triggers your imagination?

A lot of things get a spark going in my imagination. One major thing that really gets my imagination and writing going is my experience with trying to find a girlfriend. I have never really had one before and I have been trying a bit too hard to get one.  I write emails to my long term buddy from high school who goes to college on the east coast and we get creative with our emails back and forth, sometimes writing them as plays. I take inspiration from this and imagine that other people’s experiences have been identical to mine.  And another thing that triggers my imagination are the events happening around me. For example, a bunch of kids were playing with water balloons at my swimming pool and popping them and that made me think of a story of a water balloon pool party to write.

 Have any of your fiction stories been about real people or events?