Ask a Chicago person how it’s going and his response will be, “Relative to what?” That’s just the way they are at Chicago.
Yes, at Chicago there’s a rigorousness of thought. Someone starts making an argument and you immediately just go, “Let me pull out my Socratic tools and go to town on you.” On one hand that makes us arrogant pricks, right? But on the other hand, you end up actually having some really interesting conversations and you attack problems from an interesting, methodical point of view. It’s been really useful for me in a strange sort of way on my website. Part of the reason is I have civil comments as opposed to flame wars is because I basically apply my Chicago-bred rhetorical skills and tell people, “You’re drifting off topic” or “What you said here makes absolutely no sense. You’re using this argument very poorly; you need to restate it or I’m going to slam you with the mallet of loving moderation. Oh no, sorry, the mallet of loving correctness. And it works. We have good comments because people understand that if they come in and spew a bunch of crap, they’re going to get slammed down.
So, yes, the University of Chicago has been very useful in terms of writing and on a day to day basis.
Backing up a little… I don’t see any structural problems or looseness in your fiction.
That’s because you don’t see process, you see product. I may flail or go off on tangents or do any number of things, but if I’m paying attention and I’m editing myself reasonably well and my editors are watching my back, these things are not going to be problems that you the reader are going to see, right? We’re going to correct them before they actually get out to you.
Also, part of that is an artifact of my writing style. I basically make this shit up as I go along. When I write something that seems at variance from what I’ve originally written, I change it. Like, if I write something in chapter eight that contradicts something that happened in chapter two but I like what’s in chapter eight, I will go back and change chapter two so that it now makes sense.
You do that back and forth, back and forth while you’re in the process of writing. Instead of writing a first draft and a second draft and then writing the third draft, you just go back and update it while you’re writing and basically you end up with a finished product that you don’t really have to do second and third drafts on, because you’ve already done a lot of the drafting in the actual production. And it looks really tight. It looks like everything is intentional and the reason it looks that way is because you’ve gone back and made those tweaks and adjustment as you’ve gone ahead. I think that is part of what you are seeing there. It’s an artifact of my particular process, of making those changes when they happen.
The other things is that there’s often times when I’m writing a book — not necessarily in the case of Fuzzy Nation because I was working from a template that already existed, but certainly with other books — part of the reason that I write them is to find out what happens next and when a variance pops up, I’m like, “Oh, here’s how I can solve that problem and now it makes sense.” I put in stuff earlier on that doesn’t necessarily make sense to put in at the time but then later on I’ll be like, “Ah, now I can use that!”
I just finished a novel today. Like two hours ago. At the very end of it I referenced something that happened in the very first chapter and I had no intention of doing that until I was there and I was like, “Wow, this would actually tie in very well.” So when you read that two years from now when it actually comes out in book form, you’ll look at it and go, “Wow! That really ties it together.” And it will look intentional, like I meant to do that, but, in fact, it was just like, “Oh, I have this loose thread, here, let me pull that in.”
A lot of what you’re seeing as structural consistency looks, during the process, very messy indeed.
So having Piper’s template there — I can’t tell if that would be an intrusion or a relief.
In this case there was something else that was going on when I was writing Fuzzy Nation that it was very useful for me. Prior to writing Fuzzy Nation I would end up writing five- or six-thousand words in a day, but my brain would then turn into custard and I wouldn’t be able to write again for pretty much three or four days because it was just so much writing, so much “where does this piece go, where does that piece go, how does this make it all work” and my brain would get tired. I eventually decided that was a really stupid thing to do. It wasn’t a very efficient use of my time to do 6,000 words and then take a week off. It made no sense. Aside from wanting to have this relaxing project, I was doing the equivalent of what a golfer does when he changes his swing. I went and changed my writing process. I went from writing 6,000 words at one time then taking a week off to seeing if I could write a solid 2,000 words a day. 2,000 words is not difficult for me. Part of that has to do with having worked as a newspaper writer and having to write a lot of stuff very quickly and basically having to have lots of words at one time. 2,000 was enough that I felt like I was getting progress, but not so much writing that I felt exhausted. My brain felt like I still had some reserves left over to do other things. So, in this particular case, it was nice to have a template to work from so that I didn’t actually have to do that part of the process. I knew where the book was going at all times so I could just focus on writing the particular story.
On the new novel that I just finished I was making it up as I went along and also doing the 2,000 words a day and that seemed to work just fine.
These are the things you do to make sure you don’t end up shooting yourself in the foot in terms of getting stuff done. It’s much easier for me now to do a regular 2,000 words than it was to do 6,000 words and then take a few days off. The hardest part for me of any project is not the writing of it. The writing’s very simple. It’s the starting of the project or the starting it up again after I’ve taken several days off. I just sit there and say, “I could write more or… I could read Gizmodo.”
This was a good way for me to avoid continual procrastination.
Because you’re writing spontaneously, do you have trouble keeping it all in your mind? After a week off, are you going back and re-reading the first 30,000 words before you write the next 2,000? Do you have to remind yourself of chapter one when you’re working on chapter two or ten?
Generally speaking, I don’t have that much of a problem keeping what I’m doing in the novel in the “buffer”. This may sound arrogant, but keeping track of 100,000 words is not that difficult. Or at least it’s not for me.
Now, I do read some of what I had just written the day before, so that it will be a start-in, a run-in to the same rhythm and so forth, but in terms of keeping track of plot points and such that’s generally not too difficult. I know that what I’ve done in chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, I’ll have to address in chapter 17 or chapter 18. I know things are coming up or that there are things that I’ll need to go back and fix and so on and so forth. It’s not too complicated in that regard.
Lastly, what do you enjoy about this whole process — the process of making a novel?
A lot of the times when I’m writing I don’t know what I’m going to write next, so it’s fun for me to discover what happens in the story. Basically, I get to be the first reader in that respect. I get to find out what comes out of my own brain. Sometimes it’s not surprising; sometimes it’s completely surprising. Every once in a while I’ll go back and read one of my novels — Android’s Dream is a perfect example — and I just look at it and I go, “I must’ve been so high. I must’ve been so high when I thought this shit up. I don’t know where that came from, but… oh, my God!” If I’d read Android’s Dream and they were like, “Want to meet the author?” “I don’t know. He sounds kind of weird.”
It’s fun to pull at the nether regions of my creative brain and see what gets hauled up. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. For me, that’s a lot of the fun of the creative process.
The other thing is that when you’re writing, when you are into it
, there’s that concept Mihály Csíkszentmihályi talked about called Flow where everything is just going and you’re not thinking about the fact that you’re doing something, you’re just doing it, and you become totally involved in the process and everything else falls away and you’re focusing on this world that you’re creating. The nice thing about being able to write fiction is that every day is an invitation to slip into this Flow, to slip into this entirely new world that only you can see at the moment but that you will soon be sharing with everybody else.
On the best days, it all just comes together and you’re like, “I can’t believe this is my job!” Now, there are days, of course, when it doesn’t work and you’re like, “I can’t believe this is my job!” Happily, on balance, there have been more good days than bad ones.
About the Author
Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor living in his wife’s hometown. He is on the board of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, the Hub City Writers Project, and is the interview editor for the Southern Nature Project. In July of 2008, he and Jeff VanderMeer launched Shared Worlds at Wofford College, a creative writing and world-building sumer program for high school students.
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