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Who is Luke Loaghan?

 Luke Loaghan’s first novel, “Worlds Apart” was published in May of 2010. Although he majored in English Lit (a long time ago), Luke had given up on writing for the past 16 years. He spent ten years in corporate America, and has been an entreprenuer for eight years.

When Luke Loaghan attended his twenty year high school reunion, he  realized that many people were still obssessed with high school, even two decades after graduating. “Some people never get over high school.”
Boiling over with ideas, Luke started writing again. It was a long process with multiple rewrites and many plot changes. Two years later, Worlds Apart was completed.

But what is Worlds Apart about? “Its really about regret and indecisions about high school. For some people, the decisions they make don’t make in their senior year stays with them for their entire life. The characters and the supernatural ending summarizes how friendships and how people go their separate ways after high school.”

Luke’s favorite Greek myth is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (included)  but readers will find another greek myth retold as a substory.

Follow @lukeloaghan on twitter and learn more.

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Classics for a Lifetime

Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby

Tom Wolfe- The Bonfire of the Vanities

Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemmingway -The Sun Also Rises

Death, Love, & Flawed Characters

The hardest thing is when a character dies. When writing about death, you have to feel as if you just lost someone close to you. If you aren’t moved by a character’s death, no else will be either. Its helps to go to funerals to feel the grief of others. If writing about a violent event, its helps to witness violence. If writing about love, it helps to witness love. It writing about a flawed character, it helps to know such people.

Writing Tips: Going Back in Time

 

I went to high school in Fort Greene, Brooklyn during the 1980’s. In order to capture the essence of this vibrant and unique neighborhood (which would be important for the setting of Worlds Apart), I went back to Fort Greene many times. I would walk aimlessly for hours. Sometimes on a Saturday morning, sometimes during the week. I went to Fort Greene Park, and ate at many of the local restaurants. I was careful not to write while I did this, because I felt that I needed to fully ingest and digest all that I saw, and all that I felt. Writing may detract from this experience. After 2 months, and perhaps 12 visits, I let it all spill out. I wrote paragraphs describing the neighborhood, the park, the ebb and flow of pedestrian traffic, the crime, and the subways. When the story was completed, I went back and interjected the paragraphs that I had written and weaved everything that I wrote into the story. It had to feel real and tangible, and this was not easy.

4 Writing Tips

1. In many ways, writing is like running. You can’t run a marathon without practice and the same goes for writing. Start with one page a day until you can write two pages a day. Suddenly, you will be writing five pages a day and then ten. I remember after two months into Worlds Apart, I wrote 30 pages nonstop for 8 hours! I had never written more than 5 pages previously.

2. Writing has to be organic. Force yourself to not write for two consecutive days. You have to re-charge your batteries! I personally don’t like outlines and never stick to them. Rewrites can be endless. It took me six months to write Worlds Apart and 18 months to rewrite it. At some point I had written 800 pages, and felt like deleting it and calling it a career!

 3. Don’t try to write like anyone. Don’t copy anyone’s style. Don’t listen to critics or friends or naysayers. Keep everything bottled up inside, never sharing any plots, sentences, or characters. Walk around speaking like your characters. If your character drinks scotch, then drink scotch. If your character only drinks black coffee, then spend a week only drinking black coffee. Walk down a crowded street or a busy mall, and try to spot your characters. Ask yourself – what is my character doing? Why are they doing it? Stalk your characters.

 4. Free your mind enough to dream about your characters when you sleep. If you can’t make them real in your own mind, they won’t be real on paper or in someone else’s mind.

5 Books You Should Read

1. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

For nearly ten years, close friends and random strangers told me to read this book. When I finally did, it changed my life and taught me about personal integrity.

2. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

While I’m a fan of all his books, I’d recommend reading his ‘most famous novel’ first. An incredible story about an Indian man named Siddhartha and his spiritual journey during the time of the Buddha.

3. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

A National Book Award winning novel that addresses social and intellectual issues faced by African-Americans in the early twentieth century. “I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

4. Native Son by Richard Wright

A tragic story about a young man living in Chicago’s South Side ghetto in the 1930s with a powerful message about racial inequality and social injustice.

5. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

** Perhaps one of the best books ever written! It is about a deaf man named John Singer and the people he encounters in a 1930s mill town.

Word Whispers

If one phrase could capture the essence of the story: “So close, yet so far.”

The most dreaded feelings in life are arguably regret and guilt. With only one shot at each of life’s stages, the burden of living life wondering about what could have been is almost unbearable. Countless individuals look at their high school experiences as the beginning of their list of “regrets.” Can you imagine the torment of losing a loved one, retrieving her from the underworld, and losing her again–forever–because of your own self-doubt?

In Luke Loaghan’s Worlds Apart, an adaptation of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the main character, David, is a high-school senior at Stanton who cannot wait until the end of the year, and the opportunity to dive into the real world. Set in crime-ridden New York in the 1980s, David grapples with common high school problems such as low self-esteem, loyalties, which include gang ties, and more.

When David decides to ask a girl he likes, Delancey, to the prom, his friend Sam says, “You’re not an athlete; you are nothing.” Sam continued to discourage David with, “And you will always be nothing. Your future is dim. You’re not going to be a doctor or an engineer or anything, just a worker at a dead end job. Don’t embarrass yourself by asking her to the prom.” click here for the full article 

All Books Revealed

A talented guitar player, a competitive high school in an extremely dangerous New York City neighborhood, and a wild senior year create a very compelling novel. Stanton is the high school equivalent of an Ivy League university. It is very difficult to get into, and very difficult to graduate from once accepted. Stanton is the kind of high school that prepares students to be the best of the best at whatever profession they choose, whether it is business, medicine, law, engineering, or literature. The level of stress many students experience literally pushes their sanity to the brink of failure, and a number of them, during their senior year, commit suicide because they simply cannot handle the pressure anymore. The level of competition is so fierce that other students are relieved to see a classmate carted off to Belleview Mental Hospital. With one more student gone, the students ranked below the latest mental patient move up into better positions. The same occurs when students knock themselves off or become victims of the drugs and gang violence that happen on the streets surrounding Stanton.

A major theme Worlds Apart covers is the simple fact that you cannot change the past. Early in the story, David says, “I wished I was built faster and stronger, that my body had produced more testosterone. I wished that I had developed hand-eye coordination like a short stop or a point guard. If that had happened, I could’ve been a great athlete. But I can’t waste anymore time looking back at what could’ve been. No more looking back, only looking forward.”

Every high school student struggles to find their place in the world. Luke Loaghan points out the fact that most high school graduates never find their place in life. Many of them never escape their high school glory days, as if they are the best days of their lives, never to be replaced by anything better. click here for the full article