Category Archives: Writer Wednesday

Writer Wednesday: 10 Questions with Claude Lalumière

1. In Door To Lost Pages you play with the idea of stories and books that are lost, no longer accessible to the average reader. If you were going to write a definitive tome on a strange subject, one that would be removed from the world but still talked about in myth and legend, what would it be about? I would write a secret history of religions that never existed, including detailed descriptions of sacred rituals, exhaustive listings of every pantheon, and synopses of sacred texts. And not just of human religions. Those of dogs, birds, alligators, lions, dinosaurs, trees, amoeba — everyone’s. From the beginning of life on Earth to the present day, and maybe beyond.

2. You’ve edited several anthologies and you’ve also written for collections of short fiction. How does editing help you as a writer, and how has writing for anthologies helped you when putting one together yourself? Thinking about and discussing fiction and the mechanics of fiction helps my mind get to and stay in story-generating mode, so editing, which involves a significant amount of back-and-forth with writers about craft and mechanics, is a good way for me to maintain that sometimes too-elusive story-generating state. But I don’t think having had stories of mine appear in anthologies affects in any way how I go about editing anthologies. However, having read a great many anthologies over several decades has given me definite ideas and opinions about the flow and composition of an anthology.

3. Your Lost Myths show takes the act of reading stories to an audience, which authors often do, and elevates it to a performance with sound, light, and art. What have you learned from that experience and what advice would you give to authors who are reading their own work in public? The most important thing I’ve learned with my Lost Myths shows is that, as wince-inducing an experience as it might be sometimes, it’s very useful to listen to a good recording, or better yet to watch a video recording, of your performance. It’s the best way to keep making small adjustments that enable you to hone and perfect your delivery. I’ve given a lot of thought to how to best present my readings, even my regular, non-enhanced, non-Lost Myths readings. Readings have something of a bad rep, when they could and should be fun for both the audience and the performer.

Here are some of my thoughts:
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Writer Wednesday: 10 Questions with Ken Liu

I’ve realized that I know some awesomely brilliant writers. Whether just starting to make a name for themselves or authors who’ve been working in this field for decades, they have insights into writing that I may never have gotten to myself, and I wanted to know more. I wanted their secrets, their advice, the gleaming nuggets of wisdom plucked from their brains. So, I asked a few questions (10, to be precise), and these wonderful people answered. I’ve decided to share these interviews with you because I learned something about writing and you might too.

First up is science fiction author, program, and tax lawyer (yes, really), Ken Liu:

1. You were a programmer before you were a lawyer, and now in addition to that job you’ve added husband, father, and writer. How has your writing changed as you’ve acquired these new experiences? Can you see the effect of your life on your work over time, or has your style remained constant? I think the experiences of a writer can’t help but show up in his fiction—mutated, transformed, sublimated, disguised—but they’ll be there. You write about what’s on your mind. I thought much more about parenthood after my daughter was born, and the theme of parenthood became much more prominent in my stories. My ideas about the law shifted after studying it and practicing it for a while, and that change is reflected in my stories as well.

I hope that just as we grow more interesting and wiser over time—a notion that some would question—we also become better writers. So I’d like to think that my writing has improved over the years as I’ve learned more about the world and myself. But some things have stayed constant over the years. There’s a certain lens that I view the world through which leaves its mark on everything I write. I have a hard time articulating exactly what that mark is, but even my earliest stories have the same “flavor” as my latest ones.

2. Because you have less time to devote to writing than perhaps someone who writes full-time, do you have to make choices about which ideas you’re going to work on? If so, how do you decide which stories to breath life into? When I sit down to draft or edit, it takes a while to get the work-in-progress back into my head before I can be productive. Because of this cost for context switching and the many demands and interruptions imposed by the non-writing life, I usually avoid ideas that have a tendency to sprawl all over the place. But some big ideas just refuse to let me go. I’ve been collaborating with my wife on a novel, and now I’m thinking of starting another one by myself. I need to develop processes that will allow me to work on a big idea through short sessions spread out over a long period of time.

3. What was the first story you ever sold, and how would you have written if differently if you had to do it again tomorrow? The very first story that I sold, “Carthaginian Rose,” was bought in 2002 by Empire of Dreams and Miracles: The Phobos Science Fiction Anthology (v. 1), edited by Orson Scott Card and Keith Olexa. I still like that story, and if I were to do it again today, I think the main thing I would change is the drafting process. Back then, I wrote extremely slowly (it took me more than half a year to finish a first draft for a short story), and I didn’t understand how to work with critiques—I had a hard time telling apart comments that I needed to think about and comments that I needed to ignore. Writing faster and getting better at making use of feedback are two skills I’ve improved since then. Continue reading →