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Becoming a Bestselling Author, Part I: An Interview with Barbara Kyle

© Deborah Cannon

From her twenty year acting career to the publication of her five novels, Barbara Kyle has lived every aspiring writer's dream life. Trained at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, she played leading roles in many film and T.V. productions. In the late 1980's she began writing fiction and won first prize in the 1989 Dorothy Shoemaker Literary Award Competition for her short story "Night Shoot". The same year, she was awarded a grant from the Canada Council Explorations Program, which allowed her to take a leave from acting to pursue her first novel.

A DANGEROUS TEMPTATION was published by Penguin USA in 1994. It was followed by the sequel A DANGEROUS DEVOTION in 1995. Under the pen name of Stephen Kyle, she wrote three thrillers, BEYOND RECALL, AFTER SHOCK and THE EXPERIMENT, all published by Warner Books, New York. The first of these thrillers has surpassed the 100,000 mark in sales.

Barbara not only writes blockbuster novels, but she shares her know-how through a manuscript assessment service and a popular workshop, "Writing Novels that Sell." Married for 30 years to Stephen Best, she lives with him in Shelburne Ontario, near Georgian Bay where they spend summers sailing. They have one daughter.

Here is what Barbara has to say about becoming a bestselling author:

DC: Let's start at the beginning. I'm going to be presumptuous and assume that you have had some kind of formal training in creative writing. Stop me if I'm wrong. Where or how did you learn to write? And when did you first start writing? Do you think it's important to have a mentor to be a successful writer?

BK: I have no formal training in writing. But my twenty years of acting - stage, TV and film - made a terrifically useful foundation for writing. In building a character, actors work from the inside out: desire leads to action. They also play subtext, the unspoken hopes and fears beneath what a person says, and subtext is the novel's playground. All of that left me with a deep understanding of compelling, complex characters.

So acting was a great boon. It was also - in an almost negative way - why I started writing. When female actors hit the age of forty, the roles start to dwindle. The roles are more interesting, but there are a lot fewer of them. I'd seen this happen to friends - seen their careers arcing downward - and I didn't want it to happen to me. So I made a cold-eyed decision simply to do something else. I decided to write. I hadn't a clue about how to do it; I just jumped in. I remember the thrill of writing that first novel. It was like being in love; I couldn't get enough of it.