I was recently tagged by Vivek Shraya, a fellow Arsenal Pulp Press author, for a writer-related “blog hop” (he also tagged another fellow Arsenal Pulp Press author, Amber Dawn). In a nutshell, each writer answers 4 set questions on writing which they post on their website and they tag two other writers to continue the chain of responses.
What am I working on?
I’m working on a presentation for an event at University of Southern California that will intersperse readings of my creative work with discussions on a few topics, including some reflections on the short story form and my interest in the work of the artist Tom of Finland.
In mid-September, I’ll be recommencing work on my novel, which has the working title The Meaning of Life and Other Fictions. This is a novel that tackles some of life’s big questions, most of them concerning the philosophy of religion. I’m right in the middle of writing the chapter that addresses the question “Does God exist?”
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
This question is an invitation to lay claim to innovation but one that I want to turn down. I’m not doing this to be contrary, nor to be innovative by stealth via pretending to refuse innovation.
In recent years, I’ve become more suspicious of artists commending their own work on the basis of innovation (and of the ubiquity of demands that they do so). In the arts, innovation is so frequently paired with transgression. They’re a power couple that closes off other ways of assessing artistic value. This coupling has become rhetorically formulaic and increasingly prone to being self-congratulatory about the riskiness of the art. Dangerously, it can lead to declaring victory for the artwork right from the start.
Why do I write what I do?
Here’s one among many reasons: so I can have extended, multi-staged thinking sessions in which I end up saying more than I meant to say. Then I share the results with readers and they extend on those extended, multi-staged thinking sessions and we all end up saying more than we meant to say. This isn’t to say we’re over-sharing. “Over-sharing” suggests confession (which isn’t to say that confession is never involved in the process, nor to denigrate confession in literature.) But I like the idea that these sessions become a shared exercise in over-speaking.
How does my writing process work?
Even more tangentially than my fiction itself. I don’t think it would be possible for me to write the kind of digressive stories that I do without having a really digressive creative process that’s filled with a big surplus of ideas. These ideas are initially rendered in bullet point form and many stay that way, if only because some turn out to be short-term infatuations. The follow-up and elaboration on my ideas can be quite free-ranging and there’s a lot of trial and error (which makes for a long gestation). I see a book project as being a studio for what is predominantly an exploratory process.
I rarely think in terms of plot, character, description or dialogue. I’m much more conceptually-driven. I also pay heavy attention to sentence structure. I think it’s because of my undergraduate training – in part, my background in linguistics, but mostly because I was taught fiction by Gerald Murnane, who himself is syntactically-driven (even syntactically-obsessed). I’ve long felt that the main units that I deal in as a fiction writer are ideas and sentences.
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To continue the chain of responses, I’ve tagged Samuel Ace (a wonderful US poet whom I met at the also-wonderful Writing Trans Genres: Emergent Literatures and Criticism conference in May this year; we’ll be reading together at Tucson on December 12) and, in a transcontinental move, I’ve also tagged the multi-talented Maxine Beneba Clarke (we met via mutual friends in Melbourne, as well as via the Melbourne QPOC group).
Samuel Ace is the author of three collections of poetry: Normal Sex (Firebrand Books), Home in Three Days. Don’t wash. (Hard Press) and, most recently, Stealth, co-authored with Maureen Seaton (Chax Press). He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Astraea Foundation as well as the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award. His work has been widely anthologised and has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review and many more. He lives in Tucson, Arizona and Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
Check out some of Samuel’s work at the Speech Acts video poetry series curated by TC Tolbert.
Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. She is a slam poetry champion, and the author of the short fiction collection Foreign Soil (Hachette Australia, 2014) and the poetry collections Gil Scott Heron is on Parole (Picaro Press, 2009) and Nothing Here Needs Fixing (Picaro Press, 2013). In 2013, Foreign Soil won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and the title poem of Nothing Here Needs Fixing won the Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize.
Here’s Maxine’s blog.
Their responses will be available on 15 September.
Tom, I really liked this, especially
extended, multi-staged thinking sessions in which I end up saying more than I meant to say
and also the attention to concepts and sentence structure rather than plot/characters as the building blocks of a novel (I will now shamelessly steal this for the class I am teaching on LWM this afternoon).
But I am just squeeing like a ridiculous fangirl to discover that you know Maxine Benebe Clarke – me and J read Foreign Soil earlier this year and have been comparing it with your work ever since, I can’t remember if I’ve said this to you, though! Anyway, delighted that you two are on the same track as people as well as as writers.
Thanks, Ika – I’m glad you enjoyed the post! Maxine and I had some good chats over coffee in Melbourne last year. The manuscript for Foreign Soil still needed revision and we talked about that, along with the usual stuff – you know, publishing, writing, race relations in Australian publishing and writing.
I’ve never been able to relate to plot, characters, etc as the building blocks of fiction (one of the reasons why I’ve not had much interest in teaching fiction). In particular, there’s very little direct speech or extended passages of description in my fiction. I did a fiction writing workshop a few months ago. The instructors set some exercises that drew on script-writing theory. We had to write scenes involving conflict and action. I was lost – I’d never devised like that before and I wasn’t very good at it!