The Writing Process Blog Tour

I’d like to thank Toi Thomas at http://etoithomas.com/blog for involving me in this blog tour. I’m new to this sort of thing and sort of fell down on the job with regard to finding other writers to participate. Honestly, I’m not all that connected, but I’m working on it.

The way this works is I’m supposed to answer four questions about my process and work. Here goes nothing.

1)      What am I working on?

 

My current project is The Paler World series. It’s a series about a young man who finds himself at the center of a war for the existence of all the magic hidden just under the world we see every day. He must learn to see the Deeper World and use its magic in order to fight for his life and honor his parents, but first he has to figure out what he really believes and which side he should be on. The first book, The Flatstone Beach, is in revisions and I hope to have it published within the year.

 

2)      How does my work differ from others of its genre?

 

Honestly, it beats me. Just kidding. I hate this question because to answer it you have to be a real egotist and I already over-indulge that aspect of myself. All written and spoken stories, going back to before written language, build on and inform each other. I don’t write literary fiction, but I’ve read some wonderful stuff in that genre and it inspires me in my own work and gives me an ideal to strive for. Certainly the speculative fiction I’ve read also influences me a great deal. I feel like we’re all, as writers, inveterate borrowers and for me to say that my work is in some way unique or special gives short shrift to authors who I may not even remember reading or whose stories were subsumed in the work of another without anyone even realizing it.

 

I think I’ve done a fairly well at dressing my story in a different set of borrowed clothes than I’ve ever seen used together before. I’ve tried to avoid using many of the terms in the lexicon of fantasy writing by imagining the practical uses of these things in a vast and ancient magical community, and how these people might reasonably discuss these terms and items. There is an underlying etymology and lexicon that I’ve tried to make as reasonable and original as possible. I think this approach of trying to break out of the fantasy shorthand that we all share has given me some deeper insight to my characters and their world than I might otherwise have achieved. Beyond that, the best things about the story are the quick-paced action, the coming of age trials, the sense of wonder at a world beyond our knowing—in other words, my own spin on all the very unoriginal things about fantasy stories that we fantasy readers all love, expect, and keep coming back for.

 

3)      Why do I write what I do?

 

Because these are the stories I would want to read. I write across several genres and non-fiction areas because I find them interesting and want to share what I find interesting about them. I think almost all people want to share stories. The motivation behind me telling a story about magic, or a quantum computer, or an alien parasite isn’t so different, at its heart, from the motivation of a guy telling you about a great sports play or the lady who tells you about the most recent cutest thing ever that her kid or cat did. There’s something that fills our heart, or excites our mind, and we want to share it. I find this to be one of the most redeeming things about the human experience because even if the story is ugly or terrifying, it’s a reaching out for community, and often an attempt at uplifting others with something that had an uplifting impact on ourselves in some way. The biggest difference is that I use a laptop and keep my distance while most story tellers trust their audience enough to engage them face to face.

 

4)      How does your writing process work?

 

The blog just prior to this one goes into great detail on this subject, but in a nutshell, once I start on a project I work on it exclusively until it is done. If I have other ideas, I write them out and file them. When I’m done with the current project, I go through the file to see what the next most exciting project is and start that one. I consider revisions a separate writing project and blogs and so forth are marketing and don’t count as writing at all.

 

As for the creative process, I read, I watch documentary television a great deal, I listen to NPR. I am just constantly on the lookout for something that interests or moves me so I can turn it into a story, including my wife’s descriptions of her truly unsettling nightmares. Once I have that seed, I’ll turn it over and look at it from every viewpoint I can imagine until I see a facet that was unexpected. I then take that idea and try to turn it into a story someone might find interesting. Sometimes the idea comes quickly, without much reflection, and then I’m suspicious that I didn’t examine the story enough and that it is obvious or too derivative. In a small, but growing, number of instances the story comes out of a dream. Sometimes the dream provides an inspiration that I can put through my normal process of analysis, as is the case with two that are in the file and awaiting my attention at this moment. Much less often, as in the case of “Terrible Weight”, one of my most successful stories, the dream is a complete, beginning-to-end narrative that I can get out of bed and essentially transcribe into a complete work.