1. What inspired you to write your first book?
I’ve always loved words, and if I need to say something, it’s almost always writing to which I turn. Several tough years personally made me think that, if I had any desire at all to try my hand, I’d better do it before I got much older. I was encouraged by people like my friend Mark David Gerson, who has written some great accounts of what it means to recognize that you’re a writer even when those internal voices may try to persuade you otherwise.
I was also incredibly fortunate that my wife’s success in her photography career and her generosity meant I had the time and space to experiment. Watching how a great artist patiently builds her work over time has been a massive inspiration to me in terms of craft. I am a writer now because of my wife.
Finally, living in Northern Ireland spurred me in that it’s a surprisingly literary place that is suffused with stories of every kind. You’re among expert storytellers, and you can’t help but think you’d be missing out not to try it yourself. I’ve always been a fan of mythology, and I was just struck one day by the story of the giant Finn McCool, who is strongly connected to this place, and what he’d think if he were around today. The story grew from there.
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2. Writing can be a difficult job, what inspires you to keep going?
Writing has many rewards. Hearing people’s reactions to your work can’t be compared to anything else–it’s an incomparable joy. Every reader gets something unique out of it, sometimes things you never anticipated, and when you really connect with someone, you just want to repeat that as many times as possible.
As great as that is, though, it’s a bonus. You might write and not have the good fortune for others to be able to read it, and literature is full of work that nobody but the writer appreciated at the time. Conversely, we tend to forget about the work people loved at the moment but which looks awful with hindsight. You crave success, and you need some level of it if you’re going to survive, but it’s dangerous, I’m pretty sure, to depend on that feedback.
What really keeps me going, then, is the stories themselves. Even when you try your hardest to ignore them, they have a way of whispering to you while you’re trying to fall asleep. You feel obliged to the ideas somehow, to see how they’ll work out, whether you can see them through, whether you can find characters who can speak them authentically. The stories seem to need doing for their own reasons.
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3. What are you working on now? What’s Next?
I have two main things I’m chipping away at, both novels. The first, working title “The Chiral Heart,” is about a monster, the idea for which came to me when I was reading an interview with Craig Ventner and he said “insert standard Frankenstein reference here” in reference to something he was doing relating to genetics. I’ve always been a fan of the Frankenstein story, particularly the Promethean connection, and it made me realize that it’s such a trope at this point that it has indeed become something “standard,” something we don’t even really think about anymore. Being prone to try to turn things on their ears, I wondered what would happen if the monster were put in the position of the creator. We always think of the story in terms of a villain and a victim, and I wondered if the monster could be more human than that. I’ve looked at this from a bunch of different vantages and am not quite sure yet that I’ve found the one I want, but it won’t seem to let go of me.
The other novel in the hopper, which seems to have a much better chance of being done soon, is about a teenage girl who wants to be a writer and stumbles into a source of success that increasingly appears to be supernatural in origin. It’s based on my realization after publishing my own book of just how serious our wish as writers is for our work to be well-received and the lengths we’ll go to psychologically for that, sometimes without even realizing it. It’s going to be called “A Book Everyone Can Love.” It’s allowing me to salvage some experiences from my own awkward adolescence.
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4. What’s your writing process, schedule, or routine?
I tend to write in bursts. I think a lot, read a lot, make notes, keep things in Evernote and review them regularly, then I have days where I write 5,000 or 10,000 words at a time. The biggest challenge for me is finding the mental outline of what I’m aiming for, the tone and voice.
Hugh Howey had a great post not long ago in which he theorized that a lot more writers than admit it actually do this, and if you read between the lines of a lot of the advice, you do start to hear about people staring at screens for long periods or sitting around in white rooms like Emma Thompson in “Stranger Than Fiction.” To me, the key is setting it down when you’ve got it, whenever that may be. My brain tends to process a lot behind the scenes, so I try not to worry about it too much. Contrary to all advice, I don’t have a set schedule, and I don’t worry if a day goes by when I don’t write. I like Mark David Gerson’s advice to try to connect with the “energy of your writing” every day…there are lots of things that have to do with that energy–reading, thinking, etc.–that aren’t necessarily putting down words.
The other thing is that the best stuff, I find, tends to flow out fully formed. Again, a lot of my background is in editing, so I know this isn’t supposed to be “right,” but I’ve also seen that when I force myself to write anything no matter how bad it might be, I’m just going to end up throwing it away or rewriting it to the point that I might not have bothered to begin with. At the same time, it does help you see what you _don’t_ want to write, and it keeps your brain awake, at least, so I try to do something word-related every day, and if I get stuck on something, I try something else for a while. So, I have lots of bits and pieces of things lying around. I’m bad about starting things and then forgetting them.
Oh, and coffee. I never write better than just after a very strong espresso.
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5. Who is your favorite book character of all time? Why?
This is kind of like having to choose which finger to have chopped off! If you were going to ask me which character I most “liked,” it would probably be one of the kids from the “Wrinkle in Time” series. As a kid, their bookishness and tendency toward existential worry hit it right on the head for me–I thought, “that’s me”–and my heart raced when Meg and Charles Wallace were in danger, it felt so real.
I could probably read Sherlock Holmes forever–so much humor just under his surface–I could talk myself into any of a half-dozen characters from Vonnegut, I love the hard, quirky outlook of someone like Smilla from “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” and I just finished a book called “Harmattan” about a girl in Niger who was so vivid that I’m sure I will never forget her. Gavin Weston, the writer, is someone I just met, and I’m amazed by how he’s brought this very different world to life for me and engaged me in what is otherwise an extremely harrowing story. I could easily argue for the pathos of McCullers’ people or the ferocity of Katherine Dunn’s or the knife-edged zaniness of Pynchon’s.
Still, my “favorite” character, the one that first pops to mind, is probably an odd one. It’s a character I met only a couple of years ago when my wife suggested “Grendel” by John Gardner. To me, the best books help us to understand the Other, and Gardner’s Grendel, to me, is as Other as a being could possibly be while still being completely recognizable as human. It’s just perfect. You truly don’t know whether to loathe him, pity him, or love him–you’re drawn in at the same time that you’re repulsed. It’s an incredibly courageous bit of writing, a perfect archetype. So, Grendel is a favorite in the sense of powerful and memorable rather than admirable or worthy of emulation.
I’ll stop there because otherwise I’ll be thinking of favorite characters for days and not getting any work done!
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6. What advice would give to aspiring writers? 
My advice would be not to listen to too much advice. A huge number of writers are surprised by their own success, and there are few real rules. The only thing that’s going to keep you writing is that it’s about something you care about, so figure out what you care about and write that. This is part of what I’m struggling with in “A Book Everyone Can Love.” It’s a very personal process, and there are no guarantees that anyone’s going to get it but you. For that reason, in my opinion, you can’t give too much thought to audience.
Oh, it’s hard not to keep dispensing advice, isn’t it? As an aside, I heard a good rule once when I was doing non-profit fundraising: If you want advice, ask for money. If you want money, ask for advice. Anyway, in terms of writing, I would just advise that it’s much less of a mystery than most people think. Writing is a process more than an outcome. I’m hardly the first person to say that, but it’s the truth. It’s great to live in a time when we all have access to means of being heard. So get out there!
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7. What’s your favorite quote?
“Force, no matter how concealed, begets resistance.” I first saw this in a book called “Land of the Spotted Eagle,” by Luther Standing Bear, a Lakota Sioux, who, if I recall correctly, basically dictated it to an Anglo writer, so it was probably massaged in that sense, but the idea here is so powerful that it isn’t hurt by whatever translation may have taken place. I just love it. It’s akin to a lot of Taoist ideas. Politics, writing, sales, relationships, almost anything…this fact just seems true in so many arenas that I think of it probably every day. In terms of writing, I apply this in the sense that I hope my work will have a kind of balance that isn’t necessarily apparent at any given moment but is rather about the whole. I really want to present readers with something and allow them to interpret it–it’s not about trying to push interpretations. As a reader myself, I resist that. I love writing that helps me come to my own conclusions and, while this is perhaps somewhat at odds with the basic project of fiction, I try to do that myself as a writer.
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8. Who would you most like to have a cup of coffee with? (Dead or alive)
Explain…
I’m going to leave out family members and friends, because doesn’t that go without saying?
If I could have coffee with any other figure, and maybe this is another odd one, I think it would probably be Paul Newman. For one thing, I love car racing, and Newman was a car nut, so there’d be a lot of great stories there. What I loved most about him, though, aside from his being a fellow Ohioan, was his modesty. For being one of the most famous actors of his generation, he always seemed respectful and thoughtful in interviews, and he remained the kind of guy who still signed checks for his children’s charity personally. He kept things in perspective, and I’d have loved the chance to learn from that in person, and to get to tell him how genuinely cool I thought he was. Incidentally, I think this is part of the reason Hugh Howey appeals to so many people as a person–he’s managing to keep it real. It’s not an easy thing to do. Which is in no way to suggest that these are problems I currently face, just that I’m drawn to figures like those.
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9. What is your biggest pet peeve?
I would say “lack of compassion,” but then I realize I’m probably being incompassionate about that. So maybe I’ll say, “people not bothering to try to be compassionate.”
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10. Tell us something quirky about you.
I never fail to smile when I see a dog with its head stuck out the window of a car. This is part of a wide streak of slapstick humor in me.
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11. Favorite comfort food?
There’s a popular restaurant, a diner, really, in Albuquerque called the Frontier. Red chile (it’s spelled differently in New Mexico) enchiladas, a flour tortilla that was just made in front of you, onion rings, and the chance to watch the parade of life along Central Avenue, old Route 66. If I had to pick a last meal, that would probably be it.
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12. Star Wars or Star Trek?
Definitely Star Trek! Though the opening thunder of the Imperial destroyers in Star Wars made a lifelong impression on my 7-year-old self, I was already a Trekkie by that point thanks to my parents. One of my most vivid memories is a Star Trek convention in the ’70s at the now-destroyed Cleveland Coliseum, the disco balls going crazy when Gene Roddenberry walked out on stage, the gridlocked lines of car lights streaming through the Ohio countryside afterwards. That’s an image that still gives me hope for humanity.
The blend of optimism and action in Star Trek, the belief that positive organizations may someday be real, remains one of my strongest influences, and I’m enough of a geek not to have any compunction about saying so, nor about being a “Trekkie” rather than a “Trekker.”
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13. Sunrises or Sunsets?
I’m not a morning person, as much as I’ve tried, so sunsets by default.
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