Booklife

In the January 2011 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine, novelist Walter Jon Williams, author of This Is Not a Game and Deep State, says that writing has taught him “that practice and diligence will bear fruit.”  It’s a lesson Williams brought from his writing life into the dojo.

“I worked at writing for years before I made a professional sale,” Williams adds.  “This taught me that working toward long-term goals is possible, and in the martial arts necessary.”

Below, six writer/martial artists add the importance of self-expression, the value of hands-on experience, and the need for mental and spiritual balance to the list of lessons learned from writing.
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There are many ways to write a short story or novel.  Each story requires something new and different of the writer.  While the study and practice of martial arts may be more systematic than that of writing, martial arts require no less flexibility of the practitioner.  As novelist Stephen Leigh says below, there is not a single right way, but many right ways, to write a story or novel.
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Right before my daughter was born I returned to the martial arts.  I’d have a child to protect, after all, and I wanted to be able to do so.  My first belt test had me rattled.  I hadn’t been tested physically for more than fifteen years.  I’d become increasingly bookish and sedentary since my teen years.  So I did what I do well, I read the manual over and over.  I studied.  I took notes.  I took notes and practiced and studied… and studied some more.

Even though there would be no written component, I studied for my belt test the same way I’d study for a history or science exam—read, memorize, recite, repeat.

Moments before the test began I ran through everything in my head.  Moments after I’d bowed in and the test had started, I forgot everything.  And I do mean everything—basic kicks, basic strikes, basic techniques.  At one point, I even blanked on my instructor’s name.  My brain simply emptied of everything except anxiety and fear.
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Studying a martial art may teach a writer the mechanics of a fight scene.  Continued practice and discipline may give that writer insight, a subtler understanding of the physicality of confrontation, of the head game, the philosophy, of wellness and well-being.  It is hard to separate out how one discipline informs the other.  Hard, but also interesting.

Below, Steven Barnes, Stephen Leigh, Susan J. Morris, Steve Perry, and Thomas T. Sullivan talk about the complex relationship between practicing martial arts and writing.  They talk about writing action, facing fear, splitting the reader’s attention, and accepting that there is no end to learning.
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Patricia Briggs writes dark urban fantasy novels full of werewolves, shape-shifters, and vampires.  Her fiction has remained popular, in part, because her novels are character-driven and her series stay character-focused.

Briggs is, perhaps, best known for the Mercy Thompson novels.  Volume six in the series, River Marked, is due out this coming spring.  The fall of 2011 will see the release of the third book in the Alpha and Omega series, which started with Cry Wolf and Hunting Ground.  Briggs’ first novel, Masques, and its sequel, Wolfsbane, (both in the Sianim series) were updated and re-released this past fall.

Below is a brief interview with Briggs from a while back that was scheduled to run at another website but never did.  (Seemed a shame to let it gather digital dust in a Killed folder!)  Briggs talks about two of the things she does so well—world-building and character creation.
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Learning of technique, honest self-assessment and persistent practice, all lead to mastery of an art form.  Arrogance, doubt, and laziness (in varying degrees) are also part of the process.  Below, four very different writers–Megan Crewe, John Donohue, Gregory Frost, and Dave Smeds–talk about what the study and practice of martial arts has taught them about writing and life.
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Andrew Parks is an award-winning game designer and founder of Quixotic Games.  He is best known for designing the board games Ideology: The War of Ideas and Camelot Legends, and for co-designing Parthenon: Rise of the Aegean with Jason Hawkins .

Parks and the other designers at Quixotic Games thrive on innovation and collaboration.  They specialize in developing themed games and licensed property games.  Parks recently contributed an essay on Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation to Family Games: The 100 Best.

Below, Parks talks about game design and the experience of narrative.
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Nancy Jane Moore spent much of her childhood in Texas reading books.  Like a lot of bookworms, she learned about the world and people through the settings and characters found on the library shelf.  A child of the 60s, she marched and protested and hitchhiked.  In 1979, she began a journey that would last more than 30 years—the study and practice of martial arts.

Moore attended Clarion West and came out the program with a renewed sense of herself as a writer.  Her early stories were known for crisp action, blistering pace, and vivid descriptions.  As she says below, she wrote “adventure stories that allowed women to have adventures.”  Moore still writes science fictional adventure stories, but they have become more and more focused on the subtleties of human behavior.
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I love reading interviews with writers and other artists.  I love to hear or read about how artists build, make, compose, sculpt, paint, draw…  create art of any sort.  I’ll read just about any interview with a creative person talking about what and how he or she makes art, but my favorite interviews are usually with authors. In fact, I love reading them so much that I started conducting them.

In between college and graduate school, I developed a habit of printing out or photocopying interviews, half a dozen or more at a time, and pouring over them in search of nuggets of wisdom.  I sought out that special line or unique turn of phrase or secret to the riddle.  I kept files of highlighted interviews.  I quoted the good bits in the classes I was teaching or taking.  I pondered sagely advice until I internalized it.

Over the holiday, I read back through all the interviews I did for Clarkesworld Magazine in 2010 and underlined some of my favorite passages.  I’ve arranged them below and hope they’ll bring you as much of a thrill as they brought me.  There are 13 writers and one visual artist represented, including Elizabeth Bear, Lois McMaster Bujold, Scott Eagle, Theodora Goss, N. K. Jemisin, Kij Johnson, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Mary Robinette Kowal, Matthew Kressel, Jay Lake, Karin Lowachee, Cherie Priest, Angela Slatter, and Marly Youmans.  Don’t look for any theme or arc.  These are just passages that jumped out at me as being particularly relevant to other writers.  I’ve hyperlinked the authors’ names to the original interview in case you want to check out the rest of what they have to say.
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