Booklife

Marly Youmans has a way of opening up worlds for the reader, of throwing back the curtains and letting the sun shine into once private rooms.  Her novels and poems often feel like invitations to join her on a journey or sit by her side and listen.

Below, Youmans addresses a question posed by Nisi Shawl, author of Writing the Other and Filter House.  Shawl asked Youmans and a handful of other authors to talk about their experiences writing characters of a different race, sexual orientation, age, ability, religion, or sex than their own.  Take special note of the second paragraph, in which Youmans talks about writing a book for her son.

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Marly Youmans: As a woman, I am in some danger when writing about a man who could be described as sensitive or reflective. I was raised in an era that tried to declare that men and women were the same, but it’s not at all so, “equal” being so very different from “same.” I’ve had to tweak several male characters in revision to make sure they weren’t women in disguise, and that happened even when the character in question was waging war or exerting himself in feats of redwood-climbing.

I’d say that the clearest I’ve ever been on writing about the opposite sex was in the book I’m polishing now. I’ve written a fantasy for each of my children, and the current one was for made for a sports-mad boy of 12 who came late to liking books and school (still hates homework) and who is extremely social. He is blessedly normal in all his boy-ways, and all I had to do was meditate on his likes and dislikes to have an imaginary boy rise up around me along with a pack of young associates who didn’t always want to follow his lead, a fair degree of silliness and nonsense, twists and puzzles, feelings conveyed through action and reaction, a bit of revelatory violence, a fairly quick pace, and a general male refusal on the part of the primary character to ponder about anything except what must be done next, now.  And football. We had to have football.  If I could have worked in track and wrestling, I would have done so.

I have long advocated tossing little boys out the door to run with goats and goatherds until they are ten or eleven years old–until they are ready to sit still in a classroom and crack open a book–although nobody ever pays attention to this modest proposal of mine. So what I have aimed to write for my son and any other young readers is a book that might serve as one of the first adventures a boy hears after coming in from the fields and joining what is called civilization–a story full of juice and sun and life. And a dash of football.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magainze.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

Kenneth Hite lives by curiosity, receptivity, and passion.  His imagination is boundless.  His discipline and endurance show in both his continued success and his seemingly limitless ability to blaze new trails for himself and for his readers.

(Turn to page 165 of BookLife.  Hite makes a perfect case-study for the “Pillars of Your Private BookLife”.)

Over the years, Hite has written non-fiction, fiction, and gaming supplements.  His essays on H. P. Lovecraft (HPL) in Weird Tales have the depth of analysis fitting a graduate of University of Chicago.  His gaming supplements pulse with exciting opportunities for play and his lighter non-fiction crackles with his dazzling sense of humor.

“Ken Hite is the expert’s expert,” says Matt Forbeck, a writer and game designer who has worked with Hite often over the years, “especially in the fields about which he’s passionate, which are many and varied, but all things about gaming and Lovecraft leap to the lead. When he combines the two, you get fanta-synthisized fireworks that inspire all privileged enough to witness them to kick back and enjoy them in awed wonder.”

Hite moves in and out of literary worlds—from game writing to literary criticism to whatever arises next—and all the while he blends humor, intensity, and depth of knowledge.  The keyword here is blends.

“Ken Hite is not a walking encyclopedia because encyclopedias can’t make decent jokes combining modern pop references and long-dead literary figures,” said Will Hindmarch, a writer who heads up the gaming curriculum at Shared Worlds. “Ken Hite is, instead, some sort of self-feeding intellectual machine that takes in books and puts out cunning analysis. He draws savvy new connections between your favorite things — especially if your favorite thing is H.P. Lovecraft — hitting you with the kind of psyche-rattling realizations that great and forbidden tomes are supposed to.  Intellectual discourse should be like Ken Hite: funny, insightful, passionate, and ridiculously well informed.”

Below, Kenneth Hite and I discuss scope, audience, playing mental switch-up, and, of course, Cthulhu… always Cthulhu.

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Jones: What inspired you to write Cthulhu 101? And I do think it is an inspired idea with inspiring results.

Hite: Cthulhu 101 actually was a “write-to-order” piece originally. The Source Comics & Games in St. Paul, Minnesota is a terrific store that has gone in for Lovecraftian content in a big way: plush toys, essay collections, Mythos fiction, games, bumper stickers, comics, DVDs, tchotchkes, you name it. The owner of The Source knows I’m a giant HPL fiend — and knew, of course, that I’d written the role-playing game [RPG] Trail of Cthulhu because he sold it in his Lovecraft section. So he asked me if I could write something he could keep by the cash register to sell to people who didn’t know what to buy on his Giant Wall of Lovecraft Stuff. So I understood it was going to be an introductory sort of project from the get-go, and once I came up with the name and the list-and-FAQ format, the rest was pretty simple.

Jones: How’d you settle on the tone of the book, which I’d call loving and playful and just a teensy bit snarky.

Hite: Well, part of it just comes with my Generation X territory. And part of it comes from reading the truly great humor essayists — Robert Benchley, Will Cuppy, those guys — and trying to capture their tone for the 21st century. Nowadays you can’t be too earnest about stuff, especially in pop culture, or people will savage you for showing your underbelly, but the old guard have a human core to them that I think makes their masterful snark more palatable than sheer irony for irony’s sake.

Jones: I’m moderately familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos, neither a complete newcomer nor a fanatic, and the book had me laughing my head off in parts, and learning new stuff throughout. Has 101 been successful with neophytes? With hardcore Cthulhu fans?

Hite: Well, I don’t know how successful it is with any given group, although it’s selling well enough that I’m working on another “101 Book.” But I do know that people seem to like it. I’ve gotten good responses and good reviews from both longtime Lovecraftians and new fans alike. Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey gave it a great shout-out on the “H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast” and told me that it helped them explain to friends and significant others just what they kept going on about.

Jones: How does 101 compare to Tour de Lovecraft? Your approach to HPL’s fiction is a little different there, no?

Hite: It is and it isn’t. They’re both relatively informal, but aimed at different audiences: 101 is a light-hearted introduction to the whole Cthulhu phenomenon, while Tour de Lovecraft began as a bunch of blog posts on my Livejournal and turned slowly into a book project. So it began aiming at an “assumed Lovecraftian” fan, and rather than primarily being a guide to further study, it’s a collection of my initial responses to Lovecraft’s stories, and to some of the critics’ responses to them as well. Further up the seriousness ladder, my “Lost in Lovecraft” column for Weird Tales magazine is a real exercise in literary criticism, looking at Lovecraft’s work through the lens of the settings he chose. And coming out the other side, my Lovecraftian game writing lets me analyze Lovecraft from a participant’s viewpoint: what tropes and tendencies show up in Lovecraft’s worlds, and how can we use them to play narratives? I’ve looked at Lovecraftian elements in 1930s horror films (and vice versa) in Shadows Over Filmland, worked out the common principles of Lovecraftian magic in Rough Magicks, examined Golden Age superheroics in a Lovecraftian light (and Lovecraft in comic-book terms) in Adventures into Darkness, and teased out the common threads between Lovecraft and the Western in Dubious Shards. I guess the two points I’d make are the obvious one that you approach any topic by aiming at the audience, and the slightly less obvious one that there’s a whole lot of different things you can write about Lovecraft without ever getting close to the bottom of the barrel.

Jones: Why does Cthulhu inspire so many folks to create new games and stories and art and plush toys?

Well, first of all, Cthulhu sells. He’s no glittery vampire, but he does all right. Cthulhu is also a kind of tribal marker — he’s something us geeks know about and can use to establish our connection to other geeks. If you’ve got a Cthulhu fish on your car, you have a connection to someone reading Fall of Cthulhu or listening to The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. Almost everything we buy any more is informed (or even driven) by this kind of tribal allegiance, geeks perhaps most of all.

But more significantly, and I think more permanently, Cthulhu is a very, very important monster for the modern age. He symbolizes the kinds of vast, impersonal, inevitable, unknowable fears we have now: global warming, terrorism, ecocide, future shock, and so forth. Lovecraft invented Cthulhu (at least in part) as a response to Einstein and Shapley and Hale demonstrating that the universe could not be known or mapped. It was too big, and our view was too limited. That still scares us today; we want to believe that we matter, and Cthulhu is there to say that we really don’t. That’s why he’s still calling to writers and artists even after 80-plus years.

As for the plush toys: Our turning Cthulhu into a plush toy is like the Victorians turning faeries into cute children: we’re trying to domesticate the very real fears of our culture. It didn’t stick with the Victorians, and it won’t with us.

Jones: What is it about Cthulhu that attracts you as a reader and as a writer? What can writers who aren’t familiar with the Mythos learn from reading Lovecraft?

Hite: I think the fundamental thing that attracts me about Cthulhu and the Mythos at large is its scope. It’s vast; the entire canvas of time and space, illuminated by a dozen or more A-list writers (and yes, scores of B-listers and on down) in just enough detail to inspire but never too much to restrict. Cthulhu seemingly explains everything from evolution to religion, but when you look closer at the stories, things are less explained than ever. Cthulhu also dwells at the intersection of fantasy, horror, and science fiction: he’s a magic monster alien. In proper non-Euclidean style, you can come at him from all directions at once.

Even if you don’t consider yourself a Cthulhu fan or a Mythos buff, you can learn a lot from Lovecraft. I maintain you can learn a huge amount about horror and about fiction from his plots, his story structure, and — yes — his style. It’s just not true that Lovecraft — especially after, say, 1926 or so — is a bad writer. He can be a challenging writer, for those of us who grew up on Asimov and Heinlein and the post-Hemingway plain-glass style of American fiction. But he is a truly great writer, and any writer can learn from his or her betters. If you think otherwise, try rewriting “The Call of Cthulhu” or “The Colour Out of Space” in a style you prefer, and see how many of Lovecraft’s decisions you wind up repeating anyway.

To that end, I’d start any look at Lovecraft with the real great stories: “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness, “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and “The Haunter of the Dark,” say. (There’s about ten more great stories in HPL’s lineup, but those will get you started.) Every one of those stories has a sympathetic — even tragic — character, a complex narrative structure, and passages of sheer wonder and terror that will knock your socks off.

Jones: You do a lot of different kinds of writing. How do you maneuver the constant switching back and forth?

Hite: Every project has periods where you’d rather work on it than do anything else, and periods where you’d rather do anything else than work on it. The trick is to keep at least one project at the burn stage at all times. And play mental switch-up; I’m reading espionage novels for an upcoming vampire spy thriller game (Night’s Black Agents), watching Elizabeth R on Netflix while developing an Elizabethan Cthulhu game project (This Scepter’d Isle), and who knows what my subconscious is working on while I’m listening to music or cooking. For a while, I’ve had the good fortune to be working on Lovecraftian games (Trail of Cthulhu and its sourcebooks) at the same time as I’ve been writing a pulp mash-up of a more Robert E. Howardian vein (Day After Ragnarok and its sourcebooks). So I can swap out Providence, RI for Cross Plains, TX whenever one or the other seems too confining. You can’t always have that luxury — I spent every waking moment for about six weeks writing the script for The Complete Idiot’s Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated — but it’s a goal to shoot for.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magainze.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

A week or so ago, I asked a bunch of writers to share some of the best advice they’ve received and how they’ve used it.  At the same time I asked them to share some of the worst, the weirdest, or the least helpful advice they’ve encountered over the years. 

I got a range of responses, as you can imagine. 

 “Write What You Know,” however, appeared more often than any other piece of “worst” advice.  It’s the sort of advice that has been around long enough to pick up some baggage.  Folks arguing for it tend to cite a need for authenticity and folks arguing against it tend to point toward the limitations of what a single person knows.

Below, a writer of fantasy, a writer of historical fiction, and a writer of anthropological science fiction each discuss whether writers ought to “write what you know” or “write what you don’t know” or somewhere in between….  That is to say, these three writers talk about how they’ve navigated the advice: “Write What You Know.”

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Don Bassingthwaite is the author of The Doom of Kings and The Killing Song, among other fantasy novels.

Bassingthwaite:  A high school English teacher wrote on a journal entry (which I’d written as a fantasy story) “Show me the magic of the real world.” There’s also the oft-cited advice “Write what you know.” No to both counts! Why write the real world if you don’t want? How do you write what you know when you write science fiction or fantasy? I say learn to write what you don’t know.

Johnny D. Boggs is the author of Killstraight and Northfield, among other western and historical novels.

Boggs:  It’s kind of the cliche: Write what you know. OK, but I write historical fiction. If I write what I know, you’re going to have a really boring novel. I write about what intrigues me, what interests me, stories I want to tell. Now, I may not know a whole lot about that subject when I start researching, but I try to learn as much as I can to tell a compelling story. But when I’m done with that book and have moved on to the next project, don’t ask me anything about that earlier book. Chances are, I’ve forgotten most of it. Know it? I don’t think so.

Michael Bishop is the author of Brittle Innings and the editor of A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-five Imaginative Tales about the Christ, among other works of science fiction.

Bishop:  The worst advice I’ve ever received about writing is a little harder to pinpoint, but “Write what you know” has to come near the top. You see, the answer to writing about stuff you don’t know about does not lie in giving up trying to do so but instead in learning about what you don’t know either through direct personal experience or focused research.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magainze.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

Book industry veteran Richard Nash recently delivered what some – like WIRED magazine’s Chris Anderson – are calling the best speech they’ve seen on the future of books and publishing.

Nash has uploaded the video, which I’ve embedded here. See what you think:

Marly Youmans has four books scheduled for release in the next year or so, including two collections of poetry (The Foliate Head, The Throne of Pysche) and two novels.  One of the novels, Maze of Blood, is loosely inspired by the life of Robert E. Howard.  The other novel, Glimmerglass, tells the story of, as Youmans says, “a house set in a hill, a failed painter, a resurrection, a labyrinth and minotaur, a murder, a flood, an embodied muse . . . This is the wildest of dreams, set in an alternate Cooperstown.” 

Yes, you read that correctly.  One novel inspired by the life of the man who created Conan and the other set in an alternate Cooperstown (former home of James Fenimore Cooper, and current home of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Farmer’s Museum.)  It is difficult to know which of these books to be more excited about.  Robert E. Howard!  Alternate Cooperstown!

Therefore, I will sit as patiently as possible and await pre-order on both.

Below, Youmans talks about what she has learned from switching back and forth between poetry and prose.  She also reveals how a piece of bad advice has helped shape some of the most prolific years of her career.

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Marly Youmans:  I’m not very fond of the advice “write about what you know” because I think it’s too bald and not nuanced enough. Aren’t we always writing about what we know, whether we are writing about another universe or an Anglo-Saxon mead hall? We can’t get away from what we know, no matter how we try.

But I would rather talk about the worst advice that turned out best. One day when I was teaching—I quit teaching as soon as I got tenure and promotion, being of a contrary turn of mind—one of my colleagues said to me, “What does the world need with another poem?” He had no idea of such a question meaning anything to me at all. It was a joke, and I knew it was a joke. But you see, I was a poet until he said those words to me. Then, abruptly, I could not write a poem. It stopped me up completely! So it seemed, indeed, “bad advice.”

Because I could not see how people live without making things, I had to do something else. On the weekends I began writing stories. A year later I was writing a short novel. I was no longer a poet but a writer of fictions. One day I committed a poem—I was a poet again. But something marvelous had happened during the time when I could write no poems. Writing fiction had changed me a great deal. It seemed to me that all my prior poetry was simply too small. I wanted the new poems to be bigger. Sometimes I wanted them to tell stories or to be dramatic. At the same time, I wanted the poems to be as different from fiction as possible, and I picked up all the old tools that I had been advised not to use—the things that we were too advanced to use anymore—like meter and rhyme and delightful, puzzling forms.

Now I move back and forth from poetry to fiction and back again. Each changes the other. Each brings something to the other. The world is always in need of another story or poem—a living story or poem—even though the world does not know it, for the most part. And that is fine with me.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magainze.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

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Newspapers may be seeing rising circulation numbers. Maybe.

Matt Staggs is a literary publicist and the proprietor of Deep Eight LLC, a boutique publicity agency utilizing the best publicity practices from the worlds of traditional media and evolving social technologies. He has worked in the fields of public relations and journalism for almost a decade. In addition to his work as a publicist, Matt is a book reviewer and writer whose work appears in both print and web publications.

In 1963, C. Michael Curtis dropped out of grad school at Cornell University in order to take a job at The Atlantic.  He’s been there ever since. 

As the fiction editor at The Atlantic, Curtis has discovered or edited some of the finest short story writers of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, including Tobias Wolff, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Richard Ford, Jill McCorkle, and many more.

Last week, my friend John Jeter, the author of The Plunder Room, asked me, “What is a short story anyway?  How does it work?  How do you write one?”  I figured I could stumble through an answer (which I did, poorly) or I could go right to the source and ask the editor who has helped shape the answer to the question.

I am fortunate to teach part-time on the same faculty as Curtis at Wofford College, and have had the pleasure of co-teaching a class with him based on his anthology God: Stories.  He is a kind, unassuming, and generous man with one heck of a sense of humor and a fixation with finding the perfect cheeseburger.*

Below, Curtis and I talked about writing and editing short fiction.

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How does a short story work?

Curtis:  A short story can “work” in a number of ways, depending on the author’s intentions.  Some stories, the ones I tend to admire most, are “dynamic.”  That is, they move forward toward a resolution of some kind, and have a fulcrum, or transforming moment, for which the author prepares us, and toward which the action of the story is plainly directed.  This transforming moment provides a change of some sort: a concrete change of circumstance, an illuminating and life-altering insight, a moment of clarity, an authentic glimpse of the self, or the like.

The other familiar story type is “static,” or rooted in the moment.  Such stories are meant to explore “How Things Are,” rather than where they’re going or ought to go.  They depend upon shrewdness of insight, elasticity of language, a gift for weaving together apparently disparate elements into a revealing and organic whole.  They illuminate problems rather than follow characters toward decisive action, and many are both shrewd about human behavior, and entertaining in their use of language and paradox.

How do you make a short story better?

Curtis:  You make a short story “better” by tightening its focus, by removing clumsy language and irrelevancies, by making more plausible what is otherwise improbable, by incorporating wit and juxtaposition, by sharpening dialogue, by leaving unsettled the mysteries of why we do what we do, even when clear answers seem right in front of us.

I have heard you use the word “accomplished” to describe stories before.  Can you explain what you mean by that?

Curtis:  “Accomplishment” in the short story can be any of a number of things.  Some writers have a gift for dialogue that is pungent, or clipped, or convincingly regional, or amusing.  Other writers are skillful at generating the sounds and smells, the setting for the actions of their stories.  A story can be “accomplished” in these or other ways and still not quite work, or bring its elements into synch with each other.

As a student in workshops, one of my frustrations (and joys) was the discussion of whether or not a story “is working” or not.

Curtis:  If the story coheres, engages, moves its characters to a resolution of the tension that drives the narrative, then it “works.”  As a teacher, I try to guide the discussion of workshop material with questions calculated to underline narrative intent and to reveal what is incomplete, or overdrawn, insufficiently attended.

In what ways has your understanding of the editor’s role changed since the beginning of your career?

Curtis:  In the early stages of my editing career I imagined I was being paid to find mistakes and to correct them.  As the years went by, I began to think more about preserving the writer’s voice and avoiding an unconscious drift into my own.  I’ve stopped being surprised by what seem obvious mistakes in grammar and syntax, realizing that writers in the midst of a creative rush pay less attention to grammatical precision than to the impulses that bring ideas, characters, and narrative to life.  This is, of course, why writers so often tinker with manuscripts far past the point that seems useful.  As copy-editing at The Atlantic became more strenuous, in the early 1980s, I discovered an unexpected responsibility — to protect manuscripts, particularly fiction, from editing so aggressive (on the part of copy-editors and fact-checkers) that it threatened to launder all Atlantic writing to fit one mold, eliminating quirks in language and expression that gave the work its distinctiveness, even if challenging the Chicago Manual of Style.

The most rewarding part of my job as editor is two-fold: A) Discovering publishable or near-publishable work by writers not yet known to the wider reading public, and helping to bring that work into public view; and B) helping to refine that work (making it clearer, more direct, more emphatic, more sensibly arranged, more true to the author’s intention) before its appearance in the pages of The Atlantic.

What has been your greatest editing challenge?

Curtis:  My greatest editing challenge.  I can think of three:

A) Shortening stories far too long for The Atlantic format but so distinctive and artful that we hated to give them up.  One early example was a story by Joyce Carol Oates, at the time a little known but already prolific writer of short fiction.  Trimmed to half its original length, and retitled, the story appeared in The Atlantic in 1964 and was then chosen for inclusion in the O. Henry Prize Stories for that year and was awarded First Prize as the best of the stories in that collection.  A more recent example:  two stories by a writer whose first collection won a Flannery O Connor Award in the 1990s.  We published two of his stories at roughly half their original length without, I believe, leaving out essential detail or nuance.

B) A second challenge:  working with writers (often poets who have turned to fiction) whose ideas about language have less to do with literal meaning than with the sound of the words, in isolation or in sequence.  This kind of writer often resists the objection that he/she hasn’t said what is plainly intended, and that other words would do a better job.  “But I like that word,” he/she will say, “and why can’t I use a noun as a verb, or vice versa?”  Problems like this get solved, eventually, but not always in the editor’s favor.

C) A third challenge lies in the use of language too frank or sulfurous for general audiences.  When such language is fundamental to a story, can’t be changed without damage to the intent or affect of the story, we usually just return it.  In many cases, however, alternates are available and are often just as effective.  Such revisions, however, require negotiation and patience.  In recent years, frankly, The Atlantic has allowed language it would not have published in the 1960s, offending a handful of readers but probably going unnoticed by the vast majority, and certainly by those familiar with, and comfortable with, the loosening of artistic boundaries in all the arts.

What advice do you have for beginning writers?

Curtis:  Read a lot, in all fields, partly to see how other writers solve problems of dialogue, setting, pacing, theme, etc., and partly to become better and partly to become better grounded in the possibilities of form and become more aware of the models available. 

“All fields” certainly includes fiction, a lot of it.  I use the phrase, however, to encourage simultaneous reading in history, philosophy, economics, religion, etc.  As for genre writing, I doubt it helps much, and it teaches at least some bad lessons.  But sometimes you just want to get away.

Understand that first drafts tend to be spontaneous, urgent, much-loved by their authors, and almost always in need of revision.  But don’t stop and edit in mid-sentence or mid-paragraph.  Write the thing, while the creative impulse has you in its grip.  Later on fix those run-on sentences, root out awkward repetitions, remove needless emphasis, sharpen dialogue, etc.

Don’t expect to find a coherent, publishable voice overnight.  Most writers produce a great many inept stories, or even novels, before the pieces begin to fall into place.  A lot of practice is the usual solution.

*The perfect cheeseburger can be found at The Handlebar in Greenville, SC.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magainze.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. 

Note: Excerpts from this interview appeared in Jones’ weekly column in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal.

James O. Born is a law enforcement officer and a writer.  He’s also a native Floridian.  Those three things add up to award-winning crime novels set mostly in the Sunshine State.  

Born’s prose has a little bit of the poetry of James W. Hall‘s, the lunacy of Carl Hiassen‘s, and the muscle of Randy Wayne White‘s.  But Born adds layer upon layer of realism, drawn mostly from his years on duty.

Recently, under the pseudonym James O’Neal, Born has written The Human Disguise and The Double Human (forthcoming in June from Tor), both of which are post-apocalyptic science fiction set in a near-future Miami. 

As a fellow Floridian, I picked up The Human Disguise with both excitement and trepidation.  The Florida in Born’s crime novels is so real, so true that I feared he would predict an equally true future in his science fiction.  The result is terrifyingly feasible, and one heck of a good read.

Recently, I asked Born about his double life as a cop and a writer.

Jones:  You’ve been shot with a jacketed hollow-point by W. E. B. Griffin, with an arrow by Michael Connelly, and been called “Bill the FDA Agent” by David Hagberg…  those comments aside, what have been some of the most helpful comments you’ve received on fiction-writing?

Born/O’Neal:  My two careers share one common element: Everyone you meet on the street has advice for both writing and police work.  The one piece of advice I got years ago they can be applied to both is, “Don’t be a dumbass.”  If you can live by that simple motto, life and work are a lot easier.

As far as writing specifically I take it very seriously and study other writers as well as the craft of writing itself.  I also listen to my editors and work hard never to make the same error twice.  So that I hope, with each book, I become a better writer.  It all starts with character.  The plot must develop organically from what the character would do based on his history and the situation in which he has been dropped.

For aspiring writers I cannot stress enough the need to read everything possible.

Jones:  Are there any other similarities between working as a law enforcement officer and working as a writer?

Born/O’Neal:  Everyone thinks they know how to do your job.  It’s not until they get kicked in the head in a fight that they realize maybe they don’t know exactly what they’re doing.  Just as when they get kicked in the head (figuratively) by an agent or editor.  It takes a little time to realize they may not know exactly what they are doing.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magainze.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

Lately, I’ve been playing with Ustream, a live, internet broadcasting medium that allows me to speak and interact with viewers from around the world via my MacBook’s built-in webcam.

My loose, free-form program is called “Friendly Fire,” and viewers watch live and communicate with me by a built-in chat room, email, Twitter, Facebook, messenger client and Skype, and I can directly address their questions and comments as I broadcast.

After I’m done broadcasting, I can choose to have the episode available online for future viewing, and all of this is at no charge.

Right now, I’m still ironing out my program’s format. It’s not quite “ready for prime time,” so when I do broadcast, I only announce that I’m going to do so about 15 minutes ahead of time. This allows me to make my mistakes in front of a minimum number of people while I get comfortable with the medium.

Why am I telling you this? It’s because  I think that Ustream would be an  “idiot proof” way for authors to communicate with their audiences. Think about it: you can get your book to classrooms, reading circles and more, and you can Ustream yourself in for discussions and readings. Afterwards, you can archive the entire thing online for other readers, and also use it to promote future events, like live appearances. You can also download your own Ustream videos for editing and upload via a third party, like YouTube.

There are some drawbacks to Ustream: by using Ustream, you grant the company a permanent, royalty-free license to broadcast your work or create derivative material based on it. Also, be aware that you’re “live,” so you have to be extremely careful about what you say and the image you’re presenting.

That being said, if you’re looking for a no-frills and easy way to start broadcasting, Ustream may be exactly what you’re looking for. Give it a try today.

Matt Staggs is a literary publicist and the proprietor of Deep Eight LLC, a boutique publicity agency utilizing the best publicity practices from the worlds of traditional media and evolving social technologies. He has worked in the fields of public relations and journalism for almost a decade. In addition to his work as a publicist, Matt is a book reviewer and writer whose work appears in both print and web publications.

Carolyn Wheat is an award-winning fiction writer, a former defense attorney, and a highly respected writing teacher. Her How to Write Killer Fiction: the Funhouse of Mystery and the Roller Coaster of Suspense starts off by clarifying the differences between mystery novels and suspense novels.

“Like a dream,” says Wheat in Killer Fiction, “fiction can send us on a roller-coaster ride of sensation, or it can produce images as distorted as any to be seen in the funhouse mirror at the carnival.”

Even if you aren’t writing a mystery or a thriller, there is much to be learned in Killer Fiction.  I’ve used the slim volume in both literature and writing courses.  In each instance, I found Wheat’s discussions of structure and the writer-reader relationship to be invaluable, especially for writers who were having trouble making the jump from short form to long form.  (See Jeff’s citation on page 194 of BookLife.)

“Unlike a dream, fiction is a manufactured experience,” Wheat says.  “And it is you the writer who creates the dream for your intended reader.  It is vital, therefore, that you the writer understand fully the experience you intend your reader to have.”

Below, Wheat shares some writing advice.

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What is the best piece of general writing advice you’ve ever received?

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Wheat:  “Think about the book you’d most like to be reading, then sit down and shamelessly write it.”

I’m quoting from memory, so the wording may not be exact, but the advice has stayed with me for 45+ years. It comes from the late Seymour Glass, himself a fictional character, who delivered that advice to his writer brother Buddy in one of J.D. Salinger’s Glass stories.

It’s the “shamelessly” that stands out. Not ashamed of writing what you love, even if what you love strikes other people as stupid, shallow, or morbid.

I use that advice in every writing class I teach. I hope I used it with every book or short story I ever put on paper.

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What is the worst piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

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Wheat:  Hmmm. There is a fair amount of bad advice out there, unfortunately. I think the thing that bugs me the most as a writing teacher is other teachers and writer-lecturers who tell students that they either must or must not outline their work. I think there are writers who absolutely need to outline or pre-plan their writing, and others who feel stifled and hemmed in by too much structure early on. I think there are projects that demand an outline and other projects that work far better if the writer just plunges in and lets the story take her where it wants to go. I think each writer must find the best mix of spontaneity and structure for his own personality and the work at hand.

Anyone who uses a lot of must or must not in their teaching is someone you might want to discount. In all probability, all that teacher will do is make you feel bad about your own process for no discernable results.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magainze.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.