Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 83

by Vandana Singh

  Because you have something in front of you?

  At that point, it’s cleaning it up. It’s making it better. It’s enhancing it. I know what it is then.

  How do you balance the need for time to figure out the puzzle and an increasing number of shorter and shorter deadlines?

  I do a lot of talking about stuff with writer friends. Like, “I’m stuck on this thing. What am I missing?” That can be really helpful because you use a different part of your brain to talk about story than you do to write. I think that when you’re talking about your book you can get a greater sense of the whole book at once, whereas when you’re down in it you’re often looking at it through the protagonist’s eyes and you can only look a little bit ahead. Or, at least, I have difficulty seeing more than a little bit ahead, so talking about it is really helpful. Sometimes you just know that there’s something wrong and you don’t know how to make it right until . . . until you do. That’s the part that I’m not sure there’s any other way through.

  Also, I suppose when you’re talking with someone you can gauge by their response, their facial expressions.

  And they can call you out. They can be like, “That doesn’t make any sense. What do you mean? How do they get from here to there?” Stephen King, in On Writing, talks about plot as being something that you have to discover like you’re in an archaeological dig. If you take a jackhammer to it, you’ll destroy it. I remember reading that when I was working with friends to try to figure out how to make a plot. We’d sit down and they try to help me figure out the plot and I thought, “That can’t be true! We’re getting a plot and this is great.”

  But more and more I’ve come to understand what King was saying and I don’t think it was what I originally took it to mean. But, rather, that you can create a plot but you still have to find your way to the story that it is. When your perfectly laid plan falls apart, it is only for a good reason and it’s because you need to find the story still.

  Has the plot of any of your books changed drastically from talking with friends?

  Absolutely! You hear yourself and you’re like, “Oh! That’s what it is!” Stuff floats in your head and you don’t realized quite what it means until you’re really talking about it. A lot of times I have floaty ideas about what happens, and it helps to actually say, “This then this then this then this . . . Or the consequences of that is this . . . Or what I really mean by that is this . . . ” Taking it from the general to the specific is really, really helpful and, a lot of times, it really pushes your forward.

  Speaking of pushing forward, where does a book usually start for you?

  They usually start with an image or a little bit of a premise and a mood—very much a mood. I want to feel this. I want the reader to feel this. With Doll Bones, I knew that the doll was going to be made out of bone China that was made out of human bones. I knew that, and I knew that it was going to be a story about what it mean to stop playing, to stop telling stories together.

  How do you—

  [Laughter.] I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

  As your career grows, it seems like it’d be harder for you to take risks, but here are you are taking greater risks.

  Doll Bones is a story I wanted to tell for a long time. When I was first talking about it with people at my publisher, everybody had a story about how they stopped, when they stopped, why they stopped playing, and a lot of times it wasn’t that they wanted to stop. Someone mocked them for playing a game they’d always played. Something went wrong and there was some reason why they stopped.

  The obvious way to tell Doll Bones was from the girl who is visited by the ghost and who sends him on the quest and who doesn’t want to give up playing with dolls. Her name is Poppy. Originally, I thought this was Poppy’s story. And I don’t think I could’ve written it until I realized, no, it’s Zach’s story, because you are asking the same questions Zach is asking.

  Do you know whose story it is before pen hits paper?

  Ideally, you know but that’s not always how it happens. In the case of Doll Bones I’d only written a very little bit before I realized it.

  In reading the “How I wrote . . . ” posts on your blog, it seems like you throw out a lot of what you write.

  I threw out the first three chapters of Coldtown and then I threw out thirty thousand words in the middle. It was really painful.

  Why?

  “The Coldest Girl in Coldtown” was originally a short story. And I had some idea that what I was going to do in the novel was take the characters from the short story plus new characters and take them on an adventure. Great! I had a different idea for a different beginning where a girl woke up after a party where everyone was dead. But I thought I probably shouldn’t do that because it’s probably a noir-ish leftover from my Curse Worker days. I wrote three chapters with a different beginning, and then I realized, no, that the other beginning is the beginning and when I started writing it I really, really liked it.

  You feel it in your body. It’s like you have a limb that is out of place and you get it snapped back in. You can just tell when it’s the right thing.

  Do you labor over cutting 30,000 words? Try to save them?

  What happened is the kids in Coldtown are on a sort of road trip to Coldtown, which is a desperate move. Once you go inside the gates you can’t go unless you have this particular kind of marker which means you bounty hunted a vampire. It’s pretty scary. It’s been built up throughout most of the book and I was so excited to be in Coldtown that I wrote a lot of things in Coldtown, had a lot of fun in Coldtown at first, and that was just wrong. You don’t have fun in the vampire city. It’s terrifying! [Laughter] Well, maybe you can have a little fun. But not then. Not when you just go in. So I had all this really fun stuff that I had to take out because it wasn’t pacing right.

  I had so much I wanted to show the characters! From a pacing point of view it was meant to be a misdirect. Look, I’m going to lull you. But it didn’t work that way. You guys can’t not hang out in Coldtown! It didn’t feel right. My friends were supportive but slightly horrified when I cut it. There were like, “Do you really need to? It was fine! Don’t! Don’t!” But they’re used to it by now.

  It was complicated. I had to take two kids out of the group. I had to change the dynamic of who met who when.

  To take out the middle do you have to go back to the beginning?

  Sometimes you do. I’ve re-thought the book I am writing now, and I’m back in the beginning, retyping every word, because there’re too many changes. Re-typing the whole thing, then I have to write the rest. I really envy people who have a better process! [Laughter.] Someday I’m going to have a better process. That’s my goal. That’s why I love reading these books about how write a book in like thirty days. I just feel someday someone is going to say the thing that’s going to fix my process.

  What has been your most efficient book?

  I think Red Glove. That book was fast. I wrote the beginning of it in Mexico on a writing retreat. I’d come right off the last Spiderwick tour and I knew the characters from writing White Cat. It was a direct sequel and I had thought a lot about the beginning. I was really excited to work on it. It went the most smoothly of any book I’ve ever written. Pretty fast. Pretty painless. Not entirely painless. Coldtown, for all I had to gut it twice, it was a lot of fun to write.

  What was fun about Coldtown?

  I took every single thing about vampires that I liked in my misspent youth and jammed them into this book. It’s full of decadence and buckets of blood. All the things I like.

  Vampires have gone through a lot of changes since you and I were teenagers.

  Whenever you write a book, you are in dialogue with what came before it and certainly there’s no way to write a vampire book now and not have people think of Twilight. It’s just not possible, because Twilight has loomed so large in the public consciousness.

  You know, I thought, “Really? Am I really going to do this? Am I reall
y going to write a vampire book now?” Part way through, I turned to my friends and said, “Who let me do this?” In all the time I’ve been around, vampires have only ever been “so over” that someone would be crazy to write one or so popular that someone would be crazy to write one. I figured that there’s no time that they’re not going to fall into one of those two categories so I might just as well write it now.

  But I had to ask myself, “Do I have anything to bring to the genre? Do I have anything to add?” In Coldtown, there are these quarantined areas, but people are able to broadcast out of them with live feeds. They’re able to update their Tumbler pages from the inside.

  When I was writing Coldtown, I was thinking a lot about reality television. I watch some truly crappy reality television, by the way, so I’m not writing a book judging reality television. But I was interested in the way that real reality is inevitable in reality television. A few years ago on VH-1 there was a show called “Megan Wants a Millionaire,” which was an off-shoot of Brett Michael’s “Rock of Love,” you may recall which in itself was an off-shoot of Flavor Flav’s show. They had to pull the plug on “Megan Wants a Millionaire” because one of the contestants had allegedly killed his girlfriend. I say “allegedly” because he never went to trial. He killed himself. They cancelled the show halfway through the season. Like, “Let’s pretend this show never happened.” Several years later on “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” one of the husbands killed himself. Who knows why anyone does anything, but . . . Some of his sketchy financial dealings had come to light. And they didn’t cancel the show. They broadcast it. They re-cut it to pull that into the storyline. At the re-union show, someone said, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t have shown this?” And I thought, “That’s true!” But I watched all of it and didn’t feel culpable.

  So, what would it be like if you could watch kids in this quarantined area, going to vampire parties, wanting to become vampires, killing and dying? How far away would it seem like it was happening?

  How do your long-time readers feel about a vampire novel from you?

  I think that they’re “in.” I was asked by fans if I’d ever write a vampire novel. People like vampires.

  Why, though?

  Why? [Laughter.] Vampires are an endlessly flexible metaphor. We go through a cycle with vampires. We have vampire as as villain force that we fight, then we have vampire as anti-hero, then we have vampire as romantic obsession, then we have vampire as hero. And we cycle right back around.

  Yeah, but—

  Everybody’s got their thing. For years, I’ve been having people telling me they don’t like fairy books. So now I go and write a vampire book.

  When I was a kid, the first vampire book I read may have been Interview with a Vampire [by Anne Rice], which I bought for 25 cents at a garage and it had this old cover of the characters on the back with their faces painted white. They looked ridiculous—a really amazing cover. I read that book over and over again. I loved it so much. Then I read Les Daniels who had that series about a vampire who traveled through time, I believe, by going back into his silver skull. He was some kind of alchemist or magician in addition to being a vampire. Each time he traveled he romanced a different lady. One was [set in] the Dark Ages; one was set during the French Revolution, called Citizen Vampire, and then one was Aztec. Then I read Tanith Lee’s Sabella, or the Blood Star, which is one of my favorite books ever.

  What was it about vampire books that appealed to the teenage and twenty-something you?

  Certainly, being in the monster’s head the way you were with Interview felt real fresh at the time; it felt very shocking. The book was scary but I wasn’t scared. And . . . it was very decadent! It’s this fabulously decadent, debauched story—that’s what appealed to me! [Laughter.] Descriptions of wine and blood co-mingling, you know? I was into it. I was all for it.

  The thing about vampires is that they create an idealized version of us and they create a debased version of us in one being. They’re us, staying as young as we are. We’ll never get older. We’ll never get less beautiful. We’ll probably be able to manage our money situation because, let’s face it, we can invest now. Vampires are the aristocrats if the undead, but they are also us in our most uncontrolled, debased state.

  About the Author

  Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

  Another Word:

  Circles Rise Again

  Daniel Abraham

  I was in Seattle a few weeks ago for the Locus Awards, and I had the very real pleasure of meeting a few of the students who were attending the Clarion West workshop this summer. I attended the workshop back in 1998, and it was a watershed both in my artistic and commercial careers. The opportunity to talk with some of the people who were basically where I’d been fifteen years before was cool and weird and a little dizzying.

  We were at the bar even though I don’t drink, and a few of them asked me if I had any advice about how to approach the workshop. I rattled some things off the top of my head. Most were of the very mundane, very basic sort. Don’t be afraid to try new things. Don’t assume that your career is going to take off immediately after the workshop. Genre fiction is a small industry; try not to sleep with anyone you wouldn’t want to hang out with at a convention in twenty years. The usual. But I’ve been thinking about it more since, and there was, I think, one genuinely useful thing I said that night. I hope it didn’t get lost amid the clutter.

  I have never been invited to teach at any of the big workshops, and it’s perfectly possible I never will be. It’s a prestigious position, a position of real trust, and requires skills well beyond being able to put together a good sentence, a good story, or even a useful critique. But I fantasize for a living, and sometimes I fantasize about what I would say to those imaginary students. That’s pretty much the same as imagining what I would say to myself, if I could reach that earlier version of me.

  I imagine it’s the Sunday night before the first week. That the students are all there, just meeting each other in person for the first time, taking stock of each other, getting ready for a six-week bootcamp. It’s a class, and like all classes, people have roles they’re comfortable with—teacher’s pet, class clown, bad kid in the back row—all complicated by having the fragile narcissism that comes with doing something with no objective standard of success. I remember that night from the last time I was there, and apart from shifting valence, my daydream’s pretty much the same.

  I imagine having everyone sit down at a single, long table. I stand at the head, of course, because I’m the teacher and all fantasies of teaching are power fantasies. I smile, and I look at each of them, make eye contact, get their attention, and I say:

  “All right. Before we start, take a minute. Look around. Look at all the other faces in this room. This is your team. You should write that down, because it’s probably the smartest thing I’m going to say in the whole time I’m here, and you’re going to forget it.

  “It’s not that your dumb or that you’re not paying attention. It’s just that we all forget sometimes. Someone says something that sits wrong about something we did, and we start thinking they’re our enemy. Or someone does something really freaking great and we get jealous and start thinking of them as the one we should try to beat. We want to be the star of the class, and we look at everyone and start seeing them as competition. No one here is your competition. This is your team. These are the people who are going to push you to be better, and who you’re going to push. These are the people you’re going to be talking with when you have the conversations that help you define your ambitions. T
hese are the people you’re going to know when you break in, and when you’re on top, and when your career tanks and you have to reinvent yourself.

  “The truth of the matter is that nothing you do at a workshop like this matters. Workshops aren’t about making great stories, they’re about making great writers. If you turn out a perfect polished work here and sell it the minute it comes off the printer, that’ll be cool, but it won’t matter. If you can do that three times a year for the next decade, you’ll have a small but respectable career. If you don’t, you can always be the one who people say Oh yeah, you remember X? She had that one really good story. What ever happened to her?

  “You’re going to spend your time here, and it’s going to kick your ass. You’ll get better, you’ll burn out for a while. You’ll get out, and you’ll start doing the work that matters, and you’re going to forget. You’re going to tell yourselves stories about how there are only so many slots in the magazines, so many book contracts, so many slots on the Hugo short list. Hell, only so many Hugo Awards or Nebulas or whatever floats your boat. And you’ll start thinking that you’re in competition. You aren’t. These people aren’t your competition, and they never will be. Not in any way that matters.

  “Between 1965 and 2007, Frank Herbert’s Dune sold about 12 million copies—more than any other science fiction book—and that was across 14 languages and I don’t know how many countries. There are 300 million people in the United States alone. Right now, with A Dance With Dragons glued to the top of the bestseller’s list for months and the HBO program getting awards and accolades and spoofs on Saturday Night Live, I still meet people on a regular basis who don’t know who George RR Martin is. None of us—even the best—come close to saturating the market. Commercially, our competition isn’t each other, it’s Netflix and beer. Artistically, it’s always and only ourselves.