April | 2012 | BookLife

Interviewing Authors: A Look at Process

Posted on 24 April 2012 by LCM

I interview people for a living.

My methods are certainly not universal, but they’re how I get by. Generally, it starts with an assignment or a pitch.

When I’m assigned an interview, there’s a 50/50 chance an editor hands me prep materials. I’ve been given a two-inch-thick file and told to have the questions ready in an hour; I’ve also been given a name and told when to file a story. Regardless of how much or how little an editor gives me, there’s a single constant: I won’t conduct the interview until the editor sees my questions.No matter what, at least one other set of eyes sees my questions before the interview goes to print. Whether I’m assigned an interview or bring it to an editor, I do as much legwork as possible.

When I’m doing research for author interviews, I’m being paid to scour the life of another person and come up with thoughtful, interesting questions. Their career trajectory, educational background, other interviews and reviews, their twitter, blog, website—if it’s on the internet or in print, I’m going to read it. Reading other interviews is one of the more important pieces of prep. There are questions people ask over and over, and if you make an entire interview out of those questions, you’re doing it wrong. The Basics of how they started out, what inspired their book, their research methodology, aren’t bad questions. But instead of recycling those basics, use them to create unique questions. If you want to ask how their background connects with their work, lay a foundation of questions about their work as a whole first. Paint a clear, relevant picture of their career before jumping into the intriguing, unusual questions. These are about going into detail or under-discussed facets of their work, not writing questions that make you look deep for asking them. Questions you ask for your own sake are the ‘sexy’ ones; deep, existential questions about art and life and meaning.

You’re not here to satiate your curiosity, you’re here for the people reading the interview.

I’ve written the ‘sexy interview question.’ They almost never see print. Somehow, by the grace I call Editorial Mercy, my editors have either caught them before the interview, or seen them in my filed story and quietly culled them before print, taking me aside after to explain just why that Neat Question was in fact impersonal, rude, intrusive, out-of-the-blue, or asked at the wrong part of the interview. It’s not enough to write good questions. An interview needs as much care as fiction; you’re telling a story. Asking a question at the wrong time throws off the interview, sets your groundwork on fire, and ends with no one happy. This is why oversight, as simple as a friend or colleague looking your questions over, is important. I’ve had interviews saved before they were even conducted by someone pointing out “You’re asking this question twice” or “You should ask this at the end.” As for your questions specifically, prep in advance. Practice saying them. If you can’t ask them smoothly or tailor them in the moment, your ums and uhs don’t just become stutter marks to wade through during transcription, they make you look distinctly unprepared.

At the interview, try not to interrupt. It’s not a sin to deviate from the next question to pursue an interesting piece of information, but avoiding interruption allows your subject to talk, which is ideally why you are there.

Interviews don’t stop when the tape does. Thank your subject for their time. If you’re doing an interview where you’ll be taking photographs of them as well, take them at the end. After ten to thirty minutes of questions, authors will often unwind some; that degree of relaxation versus initial stiffness will net better pictures. Even if they’re not the type to smile in their photos, they’ll read more relaxed; and even the happiest, nicest author in the world needs time to warm up. Don’t touch them or invade their space without asking, whether to smooth a collar or move a displaced lock of hair. Clear directions can generally fix a visual issue without having to make physical contact.

If the interview touched on emotional topics, leaving one or more of you drained, you’ll need to decompress. It will help you finish the article, and keep it from haunting you for days. You can do this with them if it feels appropriate. Journalists aren’t therapists, but a compassionate, quiet presence is something people don’t forget. If you have the time and emotional bandwidth, sticking around to let someone talk afterward is something they rarely forget.

When your time with them is done, and you’ve finished your decompression, you go right back to work, transcribing audio and processing photos. If something is missing from your notes, say a question you could have or should have asked, or a spelling you’re unsure of, politely e-mail them as soon as you can, and continue doing everything you can to finish your interview. When it’s all packaged together — the interview, photos, audio if required — you can hand it off to your editor. After that, you wait for it to run.

I’ve always intended to email authors the night before an interview will publish. I manage it maybe 50% of the time; often, I get them a link the day or week it runs, thank them one last time, and move on to the next assignment.

Stop, Collaborate & Listen: Five Points about Collaboration

Posted on 20 April 2012 by guestpost

Lisa L. Hannett and Angela Slatter are both Australia-based speculative fiction writers. Hannett is the author the short story collection Bluegrass Symphony and Slatter is the authorof Sourdough and Other Stories, The Girl with No Hands & Other, and Black-Winged Angels. They are currently collaborating on Midnight and Moonshine, a collection of stories due out in November 2012.

For the most part, writing is a solitary activity. An idea strikes and you mull it over, jot notes, think about character and setting and plot. You may surround yourself with the company of other people, other writers — go to workshops and critique groups, to coffee shops with your laptop, or travel with notebook in hand — but when it comes to turning vague ideas into a story, when it comes to actually writing, it’s all about you and the blank page. No net.

Writers often prefer it this way. Some of us are natural introverts; we like solitude and the quiet processes of creating narratives, well-turned phrases, and engaging characters. Many of us squeeze writing in between jobs, family life, friends — so we steal a few moments out of our days to retreat into our imagined worlds. Others simply like to keep their work to themselves until it’s completely polished, until all the embarrassing plot-holes are filled and the clunky writing all tightened up. Also, the majority of writers are control freaks — we are gods in our own little cosmos.

When we think of writers, the image is of someone hunched over a typewriter or laptop, maybe in a garret, or a lavish library, but always alone — and always churning out a bestseller, of course!

So people are always curious to find out how the collaboration process works for us. How do we work together to create a cohesive narrative? How do we blend our styles and voices? How do we decide what stays and what goes? What happens if there’s a disagreement? Is it quills at twenty paces? We’ve talked a lot about why this works for us and for today, we’ve narrowed the collaboration process down to five points…

1. How does the process actually work?

We usually start with an idea sparking an excited What if? discussion; an image or concept that leads to a flurry of questions like, “what if this happened” and “what if she does this” and “what if they do this because of that — oooh, and then that…” This ultimately shapes the story’s plot. Since we live on opposite sides of the country, this is done via email, text messages, Skype or phone. Next, notes are compiled and shared so we’re both on the same page. From there, one of us will start a draft of the story — and how far we go with each draft changes from story to story. If we’re feeling inspired, we might scribble down a whole draft before we send it on; if not, we write until the words run out. Sometimes the story comes out chronologically, but sometimes we’ll build it all out of sequence, jumping between early scenes and later ones, until the whole thing comes together. The story flies back and forth until it’s done.

2. Brainstorming

Coming up with ideas doesn’t necessarily stop after the initial session. One of the best parts about collaborating is that you have someone to bounce ideas off of, which is fantastic when you can’t figure out what happens next. Both of you have a vested interest in the story, so mid-writing brainstorming can be really productive. When the story starts to take on a life of its own, no amount of planning can prevent the tale going where it needs to go, so it’s great to have someone to talk to about where it goes from here… The excitement of starting a new story is multiplied when you work with someone else — and even better, when you hit a snag, your writing partner is there to cheer you on.

3. Not being precious

Writing with someone else means that you can’t be precious about what you’ve written. You have to be willing to let them change words, phrases, paragraphs and even whole scenes. Darlings may be killed and details added or deleted. The wonderful metaphor you spent hours polishing simply might not work once they’ve tweaked the context. The story belongs to both of you, and any changes are not personal insults — they are making the tale the best it can be in and of itself. So before you embark on a collaborative project, you should have established one important thing:

4. Trust

You will never be able to let someone else “kill your darlings” if you don’t trust their writing and editing skills. We forged this in a Clarion crit-pit and built upon an initial respect for each other’s writing, then learned to be better editors from being first readers and editing for each other. The fact that we’re friends helps, and the fact that we know we’re both really serious about good editing and good writing. Our separate works are very different — Bluegrass Symphony is not Sourdough and the two could never be mistaken for each other — but when we write together the effect is a seamlessly blended third voice.

5. Communication

Like all good relationships, the secret is communication: talk about the process beforehand but also while it’s happening, so there’s an ongoing dialogue. In addition to chatting and emailing, we use track changes and comment bubbles — the best invention ever — to explain why we’re changing something, to make sure we each know the overarching concepts and can maintain the same goals for the story. Be flexible; there needs to be “give and take” to collaboration, and if you feel strongly about something then be prepared to compromise on another aspect of the story. Trust your co-author and think carefully about whether it’s worth fighting over the placement of a semi-colon.

First Readers

Posted on 19 April 2012 by Jeremy L.C. Jones

A First Reader is a person you go to first—before you send the story off to an editor, before you even know what it is you have on your hands. This is a person you trust almost as much as yourself. In a pinch, you might even trust him or her more than yourself.

A First Reader inhabits the inner circle of your creative space; he or she is separate enough from you to have a fresh perspective and honest enough to actually give it. He or she knows your ticks, tricks, and hang-ups. You have a history together—a history that is not all cheese puffs and roses—and you are still speaking to each other despite or even because of that history.

I have two First Readers—my wife who is a professor of religious studies at Wofford College and John Jeter who is a novelist, memoirist, and co-owner of a music venue in Greenville, SC. Both of my First Readers have an uncanny ability to look at a tangled ball of prose and see the threads of meaning, to stare chaos in the eye and she what that chaos aspires to be some day. Both are damn good editors, great writers, and even better friends.

John and I met a few years ago when I interviewed him about his then newly published novel, The Plunder Room. Instead of a straight ahead interview, John and I sat at The Handlebar and talked about writing and writers, music and the music business, and indulged in our mutual fondness for moderately inappropriate humor. I left with four and a half hours of tape for an 800-word column and a new friend.

The other morning, John and I found ourselves at our respective computers at the same time. John was still buzzing from having just turned in the “final final draft” of his memoir Rockin’ a Hard Place and I was struggling with writing about First Readers. So, I did what I do in a pinch—what journalists do when they have a topic and a deadline—I asked someone else some questions about the topic.

This is the first time John and I have talked about reading each others work. It’s usually just something we do—something that starts with “Help!” in the subject line or “Hey, you got a minute to read something?” But there’s more to it than that.

Why read someone else’s work?

John Jeter: Because he asked. No, really. Like Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man In The World, I don’t often read what someone else asks me to read, but when I do, it’s usually because I either like the person who asks me (and I really like to help those folks I happen to like a lot) or I find that his subject or piece is compelling—preferably both. Generally, I find that the person who asks genuinely wants what I may have to say and seeks a perspective that he perhaps hadn’t considered during or after his writing.

What is your editorial approach when reading a friend’s writing?

John Jeter: The first thing I do is try my hardest to keep from ripping the entire thing apart without first reading it all the way through, and then I try to keep from rewriting it the way I would have written it because, of course, I would have written it much better, though the story wasn’t mine to begin with and I may, in fact, have limited knowledge about the subject matter, even though the writer who asked me to read his piece suspected that perhaps I did.

In any event, I actually do read the piece all the way through first and try to take mental notes on the places where I stop or the places where I flinch or the places that I would just cut out all together. I also keep a sharp eye for the “babies,” those flashy bits (or stretches) of precious prose that scream out: “Look at what a brilliant writer I am!”

As soon as I’ve made those notes mentally, I then go back and try to give a lot of thought to the writer’s original intention and voice, and then try to guide him back to those things. In other words: The distance between the head (and/or heart) and the fingers is often as far apart as the Sun is from Pluto, which isn’t even a planet anymore. My job, then, is to figure out a way to close the gap. As an outside observer invited in, I can often see what the writer’s brain is doing and what his fingers did, and, again, with a more-objective perspective, I can determine where the artistic spaceship went adrift and try to act as Ground Control to get the damn thing pointed in the direction the pilot originally wanted to fly.

That said, once I read the piece, get a feel for voice and intent, and decide once and for all what the writer’s real message, theme and structure are, I work to show that a little nudge here, a little push there, a little extra boost here and there might make a difference in the power and quality of the project.

Is it easier or harder to read something written by someone you know?

John Jeter: I prefer to read something by someone I know. I also prefer to read something by someone who knows me and knows me really well. If I wind up being too heavy-handed with a piece and have this sense that the entire thing should be rewritten top to bottom, I prefer to be working with someone I can say that to honestly. And if I do actually want to entirely rejigger the piece, but my friend would rather keep it the way it is—despite how bad I think it might be—I would rather that he has the freedom to tell me he appreciates my edits, etc., but doesn’t happen to agree with any of them. Honest friendship makes for honest editing. At least, that’s how I feel about it.

Would you rather get edits from a friend or an editor you don’t know?

John Jeter: I tend to think of editors as friends, so I’m not sure that an editor who buys or wants to work on a project of mine isn’t already a friend, if that makes any sense.

Here’s where that comes from: I came up in newspapers. Writing one or two or even three stories a day on deadline required some fast thinking and quick writing, and then just turning all those words over to a city editor, who then turned them all over to a copy editor. These were all colleagues, people I respected, trusted and appreciated. Most of them were terribly smart, often a lot smarter and, usually, more accomplished, talented or experienced than I was. I worked to make them friends, too, as much as they were colleagues. That way, I could assure myself that they treated me and my output with discretion and some amount of generosity, because nobody wants to truly piss off a friend. Most editors, especially the best ones, the ones who also want to be a friend of the writer, prefer to be constructive, not paragraph-shredders.

All in all, what are the pros and cons of having a “first reader”?

John Jeter: My wife has almost always been my first reader; that is, outside the newspaper business and in my life as a professional writer. The pros are that she’s generous and honest, never mind that she’s immensely capable, talented and damned good at editing. The cons are that she’s right just about all the time, and that can be either humbling or humiliating, depending on my mood.

I prefer to have a first reader I know rather than one I don’t. I recently had a “first reader” that was given to me by an editor, a first reader I didn’t and still don’t know and have never met. I didn’t have any idea of the reader’s credibility, but since my editor was the one who decided on that person, well, I felt okay about the judgment(s) that went into my work. At the same time, I knew I could also simply disregard that person’s comments. But that kind of speaks to my point: If you’re sleeping with your first reader and she happens to be right all the time, you kind of understand that credibility’s already a given.

Lastly, what do you look for in a “first reader”?

John Jeter: Great looks, a nice body . . . Actually, in some seriousness, I prefer a first reader who’s like the writer I would someday like to be: a reader/editor with a generosity of spirit whose purpose isn’t so much to serve the writer’s ego as it is to serve the story. Once the story is served, the writer’s ego gets served, too. The process usually doesn’t work so well when both parties – reader and writer – go at it the other way around. So my first reader needs to care about the story as much as she cares about me, but with the generosity of spirit that communicates this one truth: I care about you enough to make you want to produce the very best story you can, and if I (we) can do that, why, you’ll wind up feeling pretty good, too. That’s a good first reader.

Death to the Chainmail Bikini

Posted on 19 April 2012 by guestpost

James L. Sutter is the author of the novel Death’s Heretic, which Barnes & Noble ranked #3 on its list of the Best Fantasy Releases of 2011, as well as the co-creator of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game campaign setting. His short stories have appeared in such publications as Escape Pod, Podcastle, Starship Sofa, Apex Magazine, and the #1 Amazon bestseller Machine of Death, and his anthology Before They Were Giants pairs the first published stories of SF luminaries with new interviews and writing advice from the authors themselves. In addition, James has written numerous roleplaying game supplements and is the Fiction Editor for Paizo Publishing. For more information, check out jameslsutter.com or follow him on twitter at @jameslsutter.

If you work in science fiction and fantasy publishing, you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase “Just put some breasts on the cover.”

This is certainly true in the gaming industry, where I work. There’s no question that RPGs have traditionally traded heavily on the Frazetta/Vallejo side of fantasy art, with curvaceous women wearing postage-stamp outfits and “armor” containing less metal than your average soup spoon. After all, we invented the chainmail bikini. This T&A approach to book covers is something everyone in the gaming industry–and publishing in general–should be more than familiar with at this point.

In recent years, however, there’s been a lot more debate about the practice. While most folks acknowledge that sex sells, a wide chunk of the audience finds the preponderance of scantily clad women on SF covers offensive. Discussions around these “cheesecake” covers often transition into morality, philosophy, and social dynamics. What does it say to your readers if the only women on your covers are soft-core porn stars (regardless of their actual personality within the book)? They become about gender bias and balance, equality, the male gaze, body image, and many other important social issues.

If you haven’t already determined that there are some major problems around gender in the SF&F publishing world, a quick Google search should yield a hundred authors better equipped to discuss the problem than I am. But even if you aren’t interested in such issues, you should know they’re out there, and that they’re both important and worth discussing.

Got it? Good. Because I’m going to ignore all that and talk economics instead. All too often in these discussions, I see people jump straight to the philosophical side of things and miss a key point:

Cheesecake covers can hurt sales.

Wait, what? How can I possibly say such a thing? After all, the only thing we all agreed on in the paragraphs above was that sex sells. It’s, like, a truism or something, right?

True–sex sells, at least in a sense. People like looking at attractive people. But I’m not talking about the fact that a character on a book is attractive, or wearing flattering clothing. I’m talking about the stereotypical, over-the-top objectification covers that editors and publishers are talking about it when they say, “Hey, can we get some more [choose one: boobs, breasts, tits, ass, hooters, knockers, skin] on this thing?”

Part of the reason this strategy is so prevalent is that, once upon a time, it worked great. Many of the folk who extol its virtues are influential industry old-timers whose opinions calcified in a previous era. For them–and those they teach–science fiction and fantasy are still “stories for boys,” and the “more boobs” strategy seems like common sense when combined with their own childhood memories of buying SF novels solely for the hot babes on the covers. (Perhaps afterward they snuck off to ogle their fathers’ Playboys, or a well-thumbed National Geographic or Sears catalogue.)

Contrast that with today’s teens. These days, every pubescent boy with an internet connection can live like the most depraved of Roman emperors. If he has a hankering to see some naked ladies, he can do a three-second image search and come up with hundreds of millions of them, in every size, shape, and color.

And you think you’re going to capture his attention with a girl in a chainmail swimsuit?

But okay, fine–let’s say that your targeted teenage boy looses reception long enough that he happens to look up from the high-definition lesbian orgy he’s watching on his iPhone, and his eyes chance to fasten on your book. He sees your bikini-warrior, and thinks, “What novelty! A semi-nude woman in an unnatural pose, with proportions rarely found in life! Perhaps the words inside are equally diverting!” He buys it. Congrats–you’ve targeted the horny teenage male market and won.

Now let’s see what markets you’re losing.

Women

Remember women? Those things you were putting on the books in order to attract the boys? Well, it turns out they buy science fiction and fantasy, too! In fact, as studies have shown us over and over, women buy far more books than men do, and make up a huge portion of the SF-buying audience (especially in the fantasy markets most likely to employ chainmail bikinis). Even gaming, traditionally seen as the most male-dominated part of the SF industry, is losing that particular self-fulfilling definition–in video games, the audience is already close to gender parity.

I’ve talked to quite a few women about the cheesecake cover phenomenon, and the reactions inevitably run from head-shaking disapproval to angry rants. Even if the women don’t take such covers as a sign of everything that’s wrong with the industry and society in general, there’s nothing there for them. An image of a sex-toy woman doesn’t say “strong, confident female character”–which, incidentally, is what most of the female SF readers I know are looking for. Instead, the problem is that cheesecake covers are honest about what they are–they say “I was created specifically to appeal to the sexual appetites of teenage straight boys.” It’s a big No Girls Allowed sign on the side of the clubhouse. And more often than not, female readers are content to oblige, preferring to take their money elsewhere.

Feminists

Note that this is not the same category as “women.” That’s because there are a lot of male feminists out there as well–guys who have strong opinions on gender and its interactions with SF&F, and who are likely to see such cheesecake covers as a regressive move that they aren’t interested in supporting.

Censors, Self- and Otherwise

Grandma and Grandpa are out shopping for books for little Timmy, who loves stories of heroes and derring-do. Which do you think they’re more likely to give him for Christmas: the one with the cool dragon on the cover, or the one where the focus is some lady’s exposed ta-tas? The same logic applies to churches, schools, libraries, folks who don’t want to be embarrassed by reading your book on the bus–all of these are folks who would otherwise have been happy to buy your book.

“Literary” Readers

People who read a lot like to think of themselves as intelligent and cultured, and SF readers are no different. When they see a mostly naked lady on the cover of something (or at least something that’s not being sold as erotica), many of them presume that the book doesn’t hold a lot of intellectual merit. You’re clearly playing to the lowest common denominator and felt that you needed to use sex to sell the book, so obviously the story itself can’t have much to offer sophisticated readers like them–right?

Immersionists

These are the folks who hate the cheesecake covers because the outfits are impractical, anachronistic, or otherwise not consistent with the world the story has created. They value detail, logic, and suspension of disbelief above all other things. Their problem with that suit of armor having a boob window–the technical term for any gap in armor designed solely to show off cleavage–isn’t that it’s demeaning, it’s that it leaves them open to chest-stabbing! Especially in gaming, you’ll find a large number of people who despise cheesecake art for what they feel is a betrayal of the character and the story, even decoupled from any real-world ramifications.

Add together all the people who might fall into one of those categories. Those are the potential buyers you’re losing with a cheesecake cover. Regardless of how you feel about gender issues–even if you’re one of those unfortunate Rush Limbaugh fans who call any woman who speaks her mind a “feminazi”–it should still be clear that cheesecake covers may hurt your bottom line more than they help.

Lest you think this is all just theory, allow me to back up my conjecture with some rock-solid, totally anecdotal evidence!

I work on the creative team for Paizo Publishing, makers of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. All of us at the company spend a lot of time on the message boards, and one of the perennial thread topics that surfaces again and again is people being frustrated by the portrayal of women in fantasy art. It’s something that folks care deeply about–and which affects their purchasing decisions.

I’ll be the first to say that Paizo isn’t scared of using sex appeal in our art — if you want cheesecake, you can find it here. But the thing that makes me proud is the fact that we try to play to all crowds. There are scantily clad women — but also scantily clad men. There are also men and women with all their clothes on. There are women in corsets, but also women in armor. Women who primp, and women who would knock you down and steal your sword for suggesting they out to show some skin. Out of our three most famous female characters, Seoni has a traditional cheesecake outfit, Merisiel has a reasonable (if snug) adventuring outfit, and Kyra wears layers of thick robes that hide everything but her face. All three of them have devoted fan followings. By giving folk a range of choices, we broaden our appeal, earn goodwill, enhance the verisimilitude and variety of our products–and hedge our bets.

I’m not interested in taking sex out of media. Frankly, I have no problem with nudity, and find it bizarre that I can publish art of graphic beheadings without anyone blinking, but need to be careful about nipples. Even after all the points I’ve made above, I’ll still continue to push for a wide range of art in our books–some characters are meant to be sexy, as are some products. My point, however, is this: sex sells, but it’s not a panacea. Rather, it’s one tool among many. And if you’re blindly following the old-fashioned advice that a scantily clad lady can sell anything in science fiction and fantasy, you may want to reconsider how such “common sense” knowledge actually plays out with your audience–all of your audience.

BookLife

Monthly Archives: April 2012

Interviewing Authors: A Look at Process

Stop, Collaborate & Listen: Five Points about Collaboration

First Readers

Death to the Chainmail Bikini

COMPLEMENTARY

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