Getting the Words Right: 8 Questions With Author Chuck Grossart

Chuck Grossart

By Sean Tuohy

After 20 years serving the government, retired Air Force Colonel Chuck Grossart turned to storytelling.

Grossart has been engrossing readers since his first thrilling and dark book became a 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Finalist.

In his latest novel, The Gemini Effect (due out April 1), Grossart tells a fast-paced story about bio-warfare and the end of all mankind. The former missile launch officer recently talked to me about about his new book, his research, and his writing style.

Sean Tuohy: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Chuck Grossart: I always thought about writing fiction while growing up, but never put fingers to keyboard until my late 30s. I was stationed in Alaska at the time, on a one-year remote tour for the Air Force, and had just finished reading an absolutely horrible horror novel (which would seem like a good thing, but it wasn’t), and I thought, “Sheesh, if this guy can write a novel and get published, I surely can, too!” 

So, that night, I began the draft of what would become my first novel, titled, The Coming. When I finished it a year or so later, I was sure an agent or publisher would scoop it up right away, but, boy, was I wrong! When those first rejections started coming in (including one that was dated the day prior to when I’d stuck it in the mail…that was extra-special!), I was shocked. How could anyone not like this? It’s a great story!

Well, it wasn’t. It was too long (700+ manuscript pages for a first novel), and it stunk. I was, however, able to peak the interest of one agent (Anne Collette of the Helen Rees Literary Agency), and for a couple of years (in her “off time”) she tried to help me take the story where it needed to go.

After about 100 or so rejections (including a couple from the same literary agency that represents me today!), I finally decided to self-publish through Smashwords. I also decided to enter the novel in the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and much to my surprise, it actually made it to the quarterfinals before getting cut. In 2012, I entered my second novel, titled The Mengele Effect (which I’d written 2003 through 2005), and it got cut in the first round. Same results in 2013. In 2014, however, The Mengele Effect won the sci-fi/fantasy/horror category, was re-titled The Gemini Effect, and is currently out there as a Kindle First selection for March 2015.

My journey has certainly not been typical, but it has been long. If there’s a lesson in there, I would say perseverance is important, as is the ability to take a step back and realize when something you’ve written needs work…possibly a great deal of work!

ST: Who did you read growing up? What type of books did you enjoy?

CG: As a kid, I devoured “Star Trek” novels as fast as I could (yes, I’m a hopeless Trekkie), along with anything dealing with airplanes and World War II in the Pacific. My father flew C-47s in the China/Burma/India theater during the war (1944 through 1945), so anything having to do with the Pacific theater was right up my alley. It wasn’t until high school that I discovered another series that I still, to this day, absolutely love, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series. Then, I discovered Stephen King’s The Stand, and, boy, was I hooked. I devoured everything he’d written to that point, and became one of his “constant readers.” Then, later, came Tom Clancy, Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, John Saul. I’m still growing up (according to my wife), and the list continues to grow!

ST: What effects did your military career have on your writing?

CG: Zero. Writing in the military is completely different—short, concise, dry and technical, get an idea across, do it quickly all in order to get a decision maker to make the decision you’re trying to get. Some might argue that the “short and concise” part also applies to fiction, and I suppose it does in an economy of words sense, but military writing reads differently.

ST: What is your writing process like?

CG: I’m not too sure I even have a process! I know some writers are incredible organized when they start out to write a story. They plot-out the whole thing, keep track of their plot points, etc. I start that way, too, but it soon becomes almost worthless as I find my stories seem to take on a life of their own and I end up tossing most of the initial prep work.

What I enjoy the most about writing is crafting a story that someone will enjoy, and remember. If I can take my reader into the world that I’ve created for them, convince them to suspend disbelief as much as they can, surround them with things that touch on their emotions—happiness, fear, excitement, dread—and leave them wanting more when they’re finished, then I’ve done my job. Some people have a hard time suspending disbelief as much as I’d like them to, and that’s okay. They can (and will) find something else to read. For the most part, though, I feel my stories have been well received, and for that, I’m grateful.

The worst aspect about writing is time, that finite commodity we all seem to have too little of. For me personally, I find my writing time falls at about the same time everyone else in the house has headed off to bed. Definitely makes for some late nights and some very early mornings!

ST: Your newest novel, The Gemini Effect, deals with biowarfare. What kind of research did you do for this novel?

CG: There’s an easy answer for this question: Google is a wonderful thing!

ST: How much of yourself do you find in each character you write?

CG: Every writer, naturally, includes a tiny bit of themselves in each character—similar fears, wants, desires, strengths, weaknesses—because that’s simply unavoidable. But I think for me personally, life experience counts a little more. For example, I have two daughters; as such, I will never write a weak female character. If I ever have a female character that says, “Oh, just hold me,” someone needs to track me down and slap me silly. My daughters are both beautiful young women, but shrinking violets they are not. They can definitely stand their ground if pressed, and one is even a better shot than I am!

Most writers would probably agree with me when I say that watching a character grow and develop beyond what you initially envisioned during the life of a story is really a cool thing. They can, and do, develop a life of their own, and may end up not resembling anything about you at all. In my chosen genre, I would count that as a good thing in some cases!

ST: What advice do you give to first time writers?

CG: Simple. Write/edit. Write/edit some more. Then, write/edit again. And, keep in mind that you’re writing can always be better. It’s definitely a learning process, and it never ends.

I think a lot of first-time writers believe what they’ve written is really, really good when in reality, it just might be really, really bad.  Like I said earlier, The Coming, in its original form, was really, really bad (which is one reason you won’t find it anywhere!).  Even with The Gemini Effect, I learned a ton while I went through the developmental and copy edit process with my editor at Amazon’s 47North, Jason Kirk. I have a post on my blog that describes in detail how Jason and I worked together to take my self-published novel The Mengele Effect—which had just won a nation-wide contest, but still needed some hefty tweaking—and transform it into what it was striving to become; The Gemini Effect.

Two other ways I improved my writing skills were to join a local writers’ group (The Nebraska Writers Workshop), and to try my hand at writing flash fiction.

Joining a writers group was really eye-opening; I was exposed to a number of different genes and skill levels, and found it very rewarding. The most important thing about joining a writers group is to be thick-skinned—be able to accept criticism, and use it to improve your skills. I’ll touch on that again a little later.

Writing flash fiction paid quite a few dividends. While perusing the titles at Smashwords.com, I ran across a short, flash fiction horror story. I read it, enjoyed it, and did a little research. Flash fiction—stories with word counts anywhere between 300 and 1,000 words—seemed like a perfect way for me to put pen (fingers) to paper (keyboard) and give birth to some of the ideas bouncing around inside my misshapen noggin. They wanted out, so I obliged. My initial venture into flash fiction was titled Ripple. I wrote it on a Saturday afternoon, and published it on Smashwords the next day. For me, the magic of crafting short stories began a few hours later, when Ripple received its first review. Two little words. One was "definitely," the other, "disturbing." With that, I knew I'd hit the exact mark I was aiming for. I highly recommend new writers try writing some flash fiction, as it teaches tight structure, tight plots, and helps a writer learn how to cut all the unnecessary chaff to keep it within a certain word count.

Also, like I stated earlier, learn to have a thick skin. Be willing to accept constructive criticism, and shrug-off the vitriolic criticism that every writer eventually receives. Is this an easy thing to do? No. Not. At. All. Like everything else, it’s a learning process. To paraphrase Isaac Asimov, there are two types of writers: Those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review. The first time you receive a bad review, it may feel as if you’ve just shown your newborn baby to a stranger—that baby is the most beautiful, precious thing you’ve ever seen—and the stranger says, “Wow, that is one ugly baby! How dare you bring such a horrid creature into my world!” Then, after the stranger vomits a few times (on your shoes), a crowd gathers, they chase you back to your castle with torches and pitchforks, and everything goes up in flames, especially your confidence as a writer.

One thing to remember is that a review is a message from a reader to other readers—it’s not directed at you. Some authors I know never look at reviews, good or bad. But, if you do, don’t take it personally. Even though someone just called your precious baby ugly, don’t ever let it kill your desire to write, and don’t ever respond. Let me say that again: No matter how badly you want to, don’t respond. Once your story is out in the big bad reviewer world, it has to stand on its own two feet. It’ll get praised, and it’ll get bullied, and you have to stand back and let it happen.

If you do get a nasty one, and it’s bugging you, keep this quote from Teddy Roosevelt nearby (it helps):

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

ST: Can you please tell us one random fact about yourself?

CG: Only one? My whole life is composed of random facts! But, if I had to choose only one, here you go, and remember, you asked: 

Back in the 1970s, James Doohan—Scotty from "Start Trek"—came to the Northglenn Mall in Northglenn, Colo., which was close to where I grew up. I took a red shirt, taped some construction paper rank stripes on the sleeves and made a construction paper engineer’s badge, which I pinned on my chest, and actually went out in public to meet him. I was 34 at the time. Or maybe I was 11? You decide.

To learn more about Chuck Grossart, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @ChuckGrossart. 

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The Gravedigger's Keeper: 11 Questions With Author Tania James

Tania James (Photo courtesy of the author)
Photo credit: Melissa Stewart Photography

Tania James’ novel, The Tusk That Did the Damage, is both a page-turner and an emotional character study. I should say three character studies to be exact, including a broken, yet resilient, elephant named The Gravedigger.  

I’ll have plenty more to say about the book in tomorrow’s book recommendation post, but in the meantime enjoy the author discuss her early influences, how she developed the idea for The Tusk That Did the Damage, and her thoughts on elephant poaching.   

Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer and how did you develop your voice?

Tania James: It never occurred to me that one could define herself professionally as a writer, until I met two working writers when I was sixteen. They were the poets Frank X Walker and Kelly Norman Ellis; I took their creative writing class through a summer arts camp. It also helped that they were African-American. Somehow the fact that they were minorities, like myself, gave my own point of view a sense of validity. I didn’t develop my voice back then, so much as discover that I had a yearning to develop that voice.  

DF: Who were some of your early influences?

TJ: My parents and two sisters have marked my writing in ways so profound I can hardly articulate the impact, even to myself. But if we’re talking literary influences, I think of Jane Eyre as a book that opened my eyes in a certain way. That was the first book that made me wonder about the author behind it, her point of view, her intentions. I remember reading Beloved in high school and then systematically reading every Toni Morrison book I could find in the library. I’d never done that before—really delved into an author’s entire shelf. I don’t know how Morrison has influenced my own writing, but I can remember burning up with this desire to move someone else, a reader, as deeply as she moved me.

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

TJ: With this book, I did listen to music occasionally, just to cue me up for a certain voice I was trying to get inside. The novel moves between three different voices, so a song could help get me a particular mood. And I did draw up some outlines and timelines for the end of the book; the three threads follow different chronologies, but then interconnect around a climactic moment at the end. But I don’t sit down and outline the whole book before writing it. It’s more helpful to me to outline as I go along, so I can keep straight what I’m doing, or have just done.

DF: Where did the idea for The Tusk That Did All the Damage originate?

TJ: In 2011, my husband and I moved to Delhi for seven months. I was there on a Fulbright fellowship, and he was opening the India offices of his international NGO, Namati. He was focusing on enforcement of environmental law, and so his reading tended toward the subjects of conservation and wildlife. He kept quoting to me from a book called Rewilding the World by Caroline Fraser, in which she describes how a number of young male elephants had raped and killed rhinoceroses on South African game reserves. People in that area had never seen anything like it before. Fraser’s book led me to Dr. Gay Bradshaw’s Elephants on the Edge, in which Bradshaw suggests that this unusual aggression could be linked to post-traumatic stress in those elephants, who had themselves been victims of extreme stress when they watched, as calves, their entire herd being gunned down. As with humans, these traumas ripple outward and into adulthood.

There is something very recognizable about that wounded form of madness; you could call it human but it’s not exclusive to humans. It suggests a complicated mind at work, which is what got me interested in the subject of elephant behavior and psychology.

DF: You employ an innovative multi-narrative structure that includes an elephant (one of the most endearing characters I’ve come across this year)! What made you settle on that structure?

TJ: Thank you! I guess my interest in elephants began with those two books I mentioned, and spread to the question of human-elephant conflict. To me, the story of the elephant in India is inextricably twined with the humans who live around and amongst them, as captors and keepers, as farmers and forest guards. It’s a fascinatingly knotty subject, and to me, the most interesting way to depict that knottiness is to include two human perspectives.

DF: Despite having to service three characters, you provide a wealth of information and backstory to each one while telling an ultimately tragic story. How did you go about developing these characters, and did they change at all during the writing process?

TJ: I don’t really know my characters when they first appear in a story. They’re sketchy, even to me. It’s with every draft that I’m adding layers of detail and experience, digging away and trying to figure out who they are. It’s all kind of mysterious to me, especially when they say or do something surprising. But it’s the surprising elements that draw me in further.

DF: How has the global issue of elephant poaching changed over time, and when did you first become passionate about it?

TJ: Like many people, I’ve been troubled by the upswing in poaching, but it was through the writing of this book that I was confronted with some very stark realities. I was shocked to learn, for example, that the Unites States is currently the second biggest market for ivory imports, second only to China There was a worldwide ban on ivory passed in 1989, but it contained a great many loopholes). The recent increase in demand has fueled the ivory trade in parts of Africa, like Zimbabwe and Tanzania, where local management has a tough time keeping up with well-funded, well-armed terrorist groups. On the demand side, the United States has responded by tightening up the ivory ban; China has passed a one-year ban on ivory imports.

In India, these days, poaching elephants is less of an issue, because the tuskers (who are all male among Asian elephants) have been greatly reduced. But this reduction means a skewed male to female ratio, which means breeding rates are low. So, it’s a grim picture throughout the world. The more you learn, the harder it is to remain neutral.         

DF: The reviews for The Tusk That Did All the Damage are overwhelmingly positive, including a glowing review in The New York Times Book Review. What has that experience been like and how do you manage writing and promoting your work?

TJ: That’s a good question—how to simultaneously write and promote—and one that I’d like someone to answer for me! I think it’s just harder this time around because I have a one-year old at home, so I’m trying to figure out the book/baby balance. Of course there is no balance, but I’m just trying to enjoy the moment and not get too antsy to start something new until genuine inspiration strikes. I’m keeping my ear to the ground though.

DF: You now have two novels and a short-story collection under your belt, so what’s next?

TJ: I don’t know, which is kind of an exciting and nerve-wracking answer.

DF: What advice do you have for up-and-coming writers?

TJ: I have a handful of reader friends whose advice I rely on heavily, even when it’s tough love time. I think it’s important to find those writerly mates who have your back, as you have theirs.

DF: What is one random fact about yourself?

TJ: When I was seven, I played Mary in our church nativity scene but my little sister crawled into the manger, thereby busting through the fourth wall and ruining my stage debut.

To learn more about Tania James, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @taniajam. 

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Game of Homes: Author Lindsey Palmer On Her New Book If We Lived Here

Lindsey Palmer (Photos courtesy of the author)

By Stephanie Schaefer

Finding an affordable, livable apartment in New York City is like finding a picture where North West is smiling: Nearly impossible. I’ve personally lived through the Manhattan apartment hunt on more than one occasion, and let’s just say there’s a reason people post #thestruggleisreal on social media. What do you do when the real estate market gives you lemons (or dingy one-bedrooms with shady landlords)? If you’re author Lindsey Palmer, you use your struggle as the basis for a witty novel.

Palmer’s second novel If We Lived Here (available March 31) follows young professionals Emma Feit and Nick O’Hare during their journey to cohabitate. However, they soon find that happily-ever-after, and keys to their dream apartment in Brooklyn, don’t come so easily. In addition to facing pesky city landlords, the couple also deals with stuck-up Yuppies, lawsuits, natural disasters, and more. Anyone who has been through a quarter-life crisis, stepped inside of an Ikea, or has Netflixed episodes of HGTV’s "House Hunters" will certainly find the characters’ experiences relatable and entertaining. 

I recently had the chance to talk to Palmer about the inspiration for her new characters, real-life apartment hunt horror stories, and her favorite part of writing fiction.

Stephanie Schaefer: How much fun was it going on tour in the Northeast to promote your first novel, Pretty In Ink? What’s one memory that will stick in your mind?

Lindsey Palmer: It was tons of fun! I teach high school, so I spent my spring break doing readings in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Each event was like a mini-reunion, as I got to visit with friends and families whom I don't always see, and who were generous to come out support me. A family friend traveled all the way from Michigan, and my first-grade teacher showed up! I also got to meet some new fans, which meant a lot to me. When I visited my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, I had the opportunity to sit in on my favorite professor, Max Apple's fiction writing workshop. It was thrilling to speak to the students enrolled in the class that I'd taken every semester back when I was in college. You didn't ask this, but my least favorite memory was when I showed up to a reading and the bookstore didn't have any of my books!

SS: Was your writing process any different for your second novel than your first?

LP: Well, I was working a full-time job while writing my first novel, which made it easier to create a regular schedule of writing a couple of nights a week and on weekend mornings. Whereas for the second one, I was in grad school, student teaching during the day, taking classes at night, and cramming in all my schoolwork on the weekends, which meant that I had to grab every spare hour I had to write, plus spend a few marathon sessions over school breaks. So yes, my writing was a lot more sporadic and irregular this time around, but I also had a deadline, which helped to light a fire under my butt.

SS: Do you have any personal horror stories dealing with New York real estate that inspired this story, or did you borrow from other people you know in New York City?

LP: I personally don't know anyone who's searched for an apartment in New York and had an easy time of it, so yes, I definitely culled others' experiences. I also have my own share of horror stories. The most terrible landlord whom Emma and Nick encounter in the book is based on an even worse landlord whom my fiancé and I encountered during an apartment hunt. Ironically, I had to tone down that character since some of the real-life details felt too extreme to be believable. We battled that guy for two years in housing court (we won!). Searching for a new place to call home, no matter where you live, is such a fraught, difficult experience because your home is supposed to be a source of security and comfort, key human needs. For this reason, I felt like a particularly tough home-hunt would be interesting to explore in fiction. 

SS: I loved the comedic, and at times sarcastic, dialogue between your characters. How did you develop Nick and Emma, and did their personalities change at all during the writing process?

LP: Thank you! Dialogue is my favorite part of writing fiction because I find that using the characters' own words is the best way to bring them to life. My goal was to create a couple that loves each other very much but are struggling, too. I also wanted to expose some of the tough stuff that can come up in any imperfect relationship, particularly during that serious-but-not-yet-married phase and during a very stressful time. In later drafts I definitely amped up the couple's conflicts so as to heighten the story's stakes.

SS: If your book was turned into a rom-com, who would you cast as the two leads?

LP: Hmm, I've never thought about that! For Emma, maybe Krysten Ritter, Alison Brie, Ellie Kemper, or someone else that’s down-to-earth who can also play funny. For Nick, perhaps John Krasinski, Jason Sudekis, or Ryan Reynolds. If you hear of a film studio interested in making the book into a movie, please do let me know!

SS: Now that you have two novels under your belt, do you have any plans for a third?

LP: Sure, I'm kicking around some ideas. I'll likely stick with the same approach of a character-driven story, and try to zero in on a different arena of contemporary life.

SS: As you know, we ask all of interviewees share a random fact about themselves. Last time we spoke you told us about your childhood baton twirling competitions. Care to share another interesting anecdote?

LP: Let's see...last year was my first year of teaching, and among many major lifestyle adjustments, one of the hardest was going from having daily access to Conde Nast's luxe cafeteria (think sushi and made-to-order stir-fry) to working far from any decent lunch spots. So I made a project of preparing a different lunch for myself each week for the whole year. I'd cook up a big batch each Sunday. I documented each week's result on Instagram, tagged #schoollunch. My favorite was a tasty 12-bean soup.

To learn more about Lindsey Palmer, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, follow her on Twitter @lindseyjpalmer, or check out our first interview with the author. 

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Writing On Stage: 9 Questions With Stand-Up Comedian Dave Williamson

Dave Williamson

By Sean Tuohy

South Florida-born comedian Dave Williamson is a natural storyteller with a quick wit that can be deadly. Williamson’s comedy gives an unflinching look at his life as a parent and grown man. He originally worked at his family’s car dealership, but then broke out and started touring nationally and recently sold a Web series to NickMom.

Williamson took a few minutes to sit down and talk about his stand-up career, how he approaches comedy, and what the future holds for him.

Sean Tuohy: What led you to comedy?

David Williamson: I really enjoyed writing in college. I got a minor in creative writing. I was a comedy fan, and a bit of the class clown. After college, I was freelance writing for magazines and my girlfriend (now my wife), took me to a sketch comedy club. I immediately wanted to write for them. You had to be a performer, so I tried out. Luckily, they accepted me and I fell in love with performing. After a few years, sketch comedy led to stand-up, and I never looked back. 

ST: Who were your comedy influences growing up?

DW: I was a big fan of “Saturday Night Live” as a kid. I'd also recite funny commercials to make my parents laugh. My mother's side of the family had great storytellers, so I spent family gatherings watching them tell tales. That's what pretty much led to me being a class clown.  

ST: What was your first time on stage like? Good, bad, or eh?

DW: I got comfortable with sketch comedy pretty quickly because I was already a good public speaker. The first time I did stand-up, I was warming up the audience at the sketch show. It went terrible. I had no idea how to do segways, or punch lines for that matter! But then I talked my way onto a theater show that a local radio show was putting on. I basically lied and told them I was an experienced stand-up. I did 15 minutes and it went surprisingly really well. I was hooked and concentrated mostly on stand-up after that. 

ST: Do you write jokes down or do you keep them in your head?

DW: I used to write everything down, word for word. After you are a few years in, you get better at "writing on stage" and working things out in your head. I write down premises, and set lists, but I rarely will write down a joke word for word anymore. 

ST: You have great delivery. Did that take time to develop or was that natural?

DW: I feel like that comes with being comfortable on stage, and doing the sketch comedy for two years before I got into stand up certainly helped with that. It definitely develops and is a process over time though. There is no book you can read and boot camp you can take that will be a substitute for stage time. It's all about logging hours on stage. 

ST: How long does it take you to create a new bit?

DW: Totally depends. Depends on the bit, and depends on the shows you are doing. In Los Angeles, you are usually doing short showcase sets night in, night out, so there are fewer opportunities to work new stuff. On the road, you can sandwich new stuff in between the proven jokes during your headline sets.  

ST: How did it take to get the material together to record “Thicker Than Water?”

DW: That was my first CD so it was a culmination of my jokes that I wrote over the first eight years or so of doing stand-up. I already have a new hour, and I'm excited to record it, because it’s more representative of my voice and ability now, and what I've been creating the past two years.  

ST: What does the future hold for Dave Williamson?

DW: More touring, and continuing to grow with my material. I hope more television opportunities, which would give me a chance to build my audience. I've started hosting a podcast called Water Polo Dojo, where I basically teach comedians about my favorite sport, water polo. I've started a production company called Clean Plate Productions so I can develop multiple Web series and independent films, creating my own stuff instead of waiting for it to happen. I'm also producing a comedy festival, so I'm pretty busy! Also, tweeting is fun.  

ST: What is the worst joke you ever heard?

DW: Ugh. That's a tie between every joke an audience member has told me after a show. Usually with whiskey breath and way too close to my face! 

To learn more about David Williamson, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @DaveWComedy.

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Back-Alley Baroque: 10 Questions With Boxing Essayist Springs Toledo

Springs Toledo (Photo courtesy of the author)

By Daniel Ford

There’s a line in one of Spring Toledo’s boxing essays about Sonny Liston that could easily be at home in an Ernest Hemingway novel:

“It had been a brutal life, and no one wins those.”

Toledo’s The Gods of War, a collection of essays about the sweet science, is filled with not just great sports writing, but damn fine writing, period. The Boston-based essayist recently answered some of my questions about how he developed his love of boxing, his criteria for grading the greatest fighters of all time, and the current state of boxing. 

DF: What came first: Your love of boxing or your love of writing?

Springs Toledo: They were nearly twins. I was an introvert from the first bell, prone to introverted activities like reading and writing stories. Grammar school introverts are fun targets for extroverted belligerents and for years I faced perilous bus rides and high-anxiety recesses. Boxing, which I picked up in the seventh grade, changed everything. For me it was counterterrorism. I was able to stand up for myself without getting immediately knocked down and after doing so once or twice, my quality of life improved remarkably. I love writing, but I not only love boxing, I owe it.

DF: If you had to describe your writing style in one word, what would it be?

ST: If you let me have three words and don’t mind me bogarting a commentator’s description of Roberto Duran’s boxing style, I’ll say “back-alley baroque.” That’s what I’m going for anyway.

DF: What is your writing process like, and how would you say it might differ from that of fiction authors or other sports journalists?

ST: Someone contacted me not long ago and said that my writing seems so effortlessly rhythmic. I laughed and laughed. No one knows how I suffer. Effortlessly rhythmic? I liken it to sitting crossed-legged on a sidewalk with a mallet and a trashcan, trying to create something memorable, half the time in the dark. So I suppose my process is more comparable than not to a novelist’s in that they go through more drafts than they’ll admit to get it right. I have a perfectionist’s tendencies, exacerbated by the journalist’s responsibility for accuracy that stands like a golem in the room. I strive to be at once informative and entertaining. It seems appropriate when you think about it. Writing well is like boxing well: In solitude, science and art.

DF: The Gods of War is written in such a fun, fresh, and engaging style. How did you develop your voice as a sports writer?

ST: Exclusivity is one reason. I’m more of a boxing essayist than a sports writer. I couldn’t tell you three players in the NFL or two in the NBA. Mainstream sports never appealed to me. Why spend three hours watching grown men chasing a ball around when you can spend one hour (or less or much less) experiencing a far more poignant and personal spectacle with far more at stake?

As a subject, the sweet science is every bit as rich as Dicken’s London. It has attracted writers with names like Hemingway, Schulberg, and Liebling. And Dickens and London (as in Jack) for that matter. And I’d bet they’d all tell you something similar regarding their attraction to it. It isn’t just a carnival of masculine virtues for the edification of chauvinists. It’s really a stripped-down study of the human condition and what’s more fascinating than that? You can see so much in a fighter’s eyes during the course of a fight. But what we really see, I think, is a mirror. Ignore for a moment a world-class boxer’s stature as a supreme athlete, as a throwback to our mythic past. Look in his eyes. The humanity never leaves despite all the work they do suppress a significant part of it. On the contrary, the look in their eyes is more human than human. I suppose that’s because they are a facing our common fears all at once—violence, and pain, performing in public, humiliation, claustrophobia. Anyone who has ever boxed seriously if not professionally can relate. It’s terrifying at every level. 

DF: Your collection of essays makes the case that boxers like Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson weren’t the greatest of all time. What set of criteria did you develop to start researching this project?

ST: First off, the vast majority of boxing guys who have published pound-for-pound greatest lists have no criteria. They wing it. I tried to quantify mine enough to really see what’s going on, but not so much as to chase it out of the ring. In other words, part of “greatness” defies the statistician. The single most valuable measure in my mind is the caliber of a fighter’s opponents. To illustrate, if I am an undefeated fighter but never entered the ring as an underdog, how great could I be? If I beat second-tier opponents with sparingly few elite opponents, then my greatness is more assumed than proven. Accomplishments must be linked hard to what was overcome; in boxing, it’s mainly about whom you have overcome. In addition to that I considered ring generalship, longevity, dominance, durability, performance against larger men, and intangibles. After all of those considerations were examined and examined again, the name of the greatest boxer since 1920 was like lightning. And the deeper you go into the historical record, the more you examine who he fought and how often he fought and what he had to overcome during his career, the more Robinson and Ali fade in the distance, great though they were.     

DF: Did you have one particular favorite boxer that you kept turning up facts about while researching and writing?

ST: I’ve always had a fascination for Roberto Duran. He’s Odysseus.

DF: The reviews for The Gods of War are overwhelmingly positive. Any plans for a future collection of essays?

ST: Yes. Two, actually. The next one will focus on fighters and fights I’ve covered over the past six years. The working title is In the Cheap Seats: Boxing Essays. After that will be a big one called Murderers’ Row, which will be comprised of several series I’ve done and am still doing about eight black contenders in the 1940s who were avoided by the champions and who became boxing’s “Untold Mysteries.”  

DF: What do you think about the current state of boxing? Related to that, who are some of the more unknown fighters that people should be following?

ST: Jimmy Cannon once called boxing “the red-light district of sports.” That quip is as relevant today as it was then. Some things have gotten worse. Many writers are deeply concerned about performance-enhancing drugs in the sport. If we could peer into the gray to see how many world-class fighters and contenders use them, there would be a collective gasp and more calls to abolish boxing. This isn’t Lance Armstrong on a bicycle; this is two men trying to overcome each other with violence. The sport’s inattention to this problem will see increased casualties—not only with stretchers in the ring but with debilitated retirees that never make the papers.

Another serious problem that is largely responsible for reducing boxing to a niche sport is the lack of clarity regarding the championships. The self-appointed sanctioning bodies profit off every so-called title bout and so have a vested interest in flooding the sport with trick titles. Instead of ignoring them out of existence, most boxing writers acknowledge those trick titles as if they were synonymous with world championships. They’ll refer to one of six different lightweights as “champion” of the division, despite the plain fact that there is one and can only be one.

There is much wrong with boxing, but there remains nothing in the world of sports that compares to a great prizefight. Nothing. And we have great fighters rising up all over the globe. Willie Monroe Jr. made his name on ESPN’s “Friday Night Fights” last year and is on the brink of becoming a middleweight contender. His great uncle was Willie “The Worm” Monroe, a Philadelphia fighter and the only man ever to decisively beat Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Terence Crawford, the true lightweight champion of the world, is a perfect gentleman and a supreme boxer-puncher from Omaha, Neb. of all places. Naoya Inoue is 21 years old and from Japan. He stands only 5-foot 4-inches and weighs no more than 115 pounds. His nickname? “Monster.” Watch his last fight on YouTube and you’ll see why. Last I heard, he chased Godzilla outta Tokyo. 

DF: What advice would you give to up-and-coming sports writers?

ST: Develop your craft and find your own style. Read books that are not sports-related. Read The New Yorker. If you turn a phrase or offer an insight that seems familiar, consider the risk of plagiarism and Google it before claiming it. Avoid clichés. Don’t cross the line between poignant and maudlin. Don’t expect to make a living doing it. Whether you write for an audience of two million or two, respect them and your name enough to offer your best. Respect every athlete, especially fighters, because what they do is exceedingly dangerous and difficult and chances are excellent that you couldn’t do it.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?

ST: I can do a near-perfect impression of Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone from “The Godfather.”

The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive

Country Discomfort: Author David Joy On Appalachian Noir and His Debut Novel

David Joy (Photo credit: Alan Rhew)

By Daniel Ford

There are character studies, and then there are character studies armed with rundown pickup trucks, rotgut bourbon, fermenting single wides, and hillbilly kingpins.

David Joy’s debut novel Where All Light Tends to Go, which is available to purchase starting today, is very much the latter. After reading M.O. Walsh’s My Sunshine Away and watching the recent episodes of the final season of “Justified,” I was primed to thoroughly enjoy Where All Light Tends to Go, an “Appalachian noir” that tells the story of a young man caught at the crossroads between his meth-dealing father and freedom with the love of his life. I’ll have a more extensive review of the book later this month, but I can assure you that you’ll be cheering and crying in equal measure for Jacob McNeely by the end.    

Joy was kind enough to answers some of my questions recently about his inspiration for Where All Light Tends to Go, his writing process, and why persistence is so important for aspiring writers.

Photos courtesy of G.P. Putnam's Sons

Daniel Ford: I heard you were on book tour for Where All Light Tends to Go with M.O. Walsh. How much fun did you have promoting your debut novel?

David Joy: I met Neal (M.O. Walsh) in the Charlotte airport on the way to SIBA 2014 and we became really quick friends. We both had debut novels coming out of the same house, we were both Southerners, and we both took our bourbon with ice, and that type of thing leaves little room for arguing. Last fall, me, Neal, Ace Atkins, and C.J. Box went with Putnam for a Books, Beer, and Bourbon Tour hitting Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and New York City over the course of four days. It was an absolute whirlwind, but it was a lot of fun. I’ll see Neal again in a few weeks in New Orleans for a reading at Octavia Books, but he and I text each other every few days just to see how things are going.

I do think some people have a misconception about something like a book tour. From the outside it seems absolutely wonderful to be traveling around the country and seeing cities and meeting people, but at the same time writers are typically people of solitude. Unlike music or theatre, writing is a lot closer to something like painting where the work is done alone and in a fashion where the art is created without the intention of the artist to ever interact with his/her audience. I typically interact with very few people in my daily life and I rarely, if ever, leave the mountains. That being said, I have fun on the road but it wears me out quickly. It doesn’t take me long to start missing Jackson County.

DF: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer, and how did you develop your voice?

DJ: I grew up in a really rich storytelling tradition, and I think that had a major influence on me early. My parents had an electric typewriter under one of the end tables and some of my earliest memories are dragging that machine out onto the shag carpet. I can remember the way it would heat up the paper and the smell of the paper, the way the letters sounded as they hammered the page. I can’t really remember any of the stories, but my mother says I was doing that before I could spell. She said I’d tell her what I wanted to say and she’d dictate the keys to press to spell the words. So I think really early on, like five or six years old, I don’t know that I consciously knew that I wanted to be writer, but I think I was fascinated with what a word could do on a page. I wrote my whole life, but I started to take it seriously and know that I wanted to make it a career when I was in high school, and then especially once I got into college. I started young, but none of that early work was any good. I don’t think I wrote anything worth a damn until my mid-twenties and even then it wasn’t what it is now. I’m not a very quick study.

DF: Who were some of your early influences?

DJ: The earliest novels I remember having a real impact on me were Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet and Walter Dean Myers’ Fallen Angels. I was a really weird kid. I remember checking out Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the library when I was either in elementary school or sixth grade. I read that and I read Nostradamus. My dad was obsessed with Stephen King when I was little, and I tried to read a few of those. Of course I didn’t understand any of it. I don’t really know what I was doing, but I remember having a fascination with the language of it and the way it sounded when I read it aloud. But as far as the major influences for what I’m doing now, I’d say Larry Brown, Daniel Woodrell, William Gay, Cormac McCarthy, Ron Rash, Harry Crews, Faulkner, O’Connor, just the usual suspects for someone who grew up in the South and writes the types of things I write.

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

DJ: A lot of times I’ll have a song that I’ll attach to a character or a story, so for Where All Light Tends To Go, Jacob’s song was Townes Van Zandt’s “Rex’s Blues.” But I never play the song while I’m writing. I have to have complete silence while I’m working, and I typically seem to be at my best in the hours between midnight and sunrise when the whole world has stilled. As for the song, though, it’s something I’ll usually play at the start, similar to how you’d build the sound of a singing bowl as you’re headed into meditation. I’ll use that song as a way to enter the story, but once I’m inside I need silence.

I never outline. My work is character driven. I have characters that develop very clearly. I can see everything about them, from the way they look to the type of coffee they buy. Once I have a character like that it’s just a matter of throwing him into a situation and seeing what he does. As far as the daily writing habits, I usually have a line that’ll come to me and that will start it off. Sometimes I wake up with that line in my head, or sometimes it might take a while to find it. I’m very methodical. I need one good sentence before I can move forward. Sometimes I might sit all day without anything. I’m not one for writing just for the sake of writing. I trust that it will come and if it’s a matter of waiting around then I’ll wait.

DF: Where did the idea for Where All Light Tends to Go originate? Was it something you’d been thinking about for a long time, or did it come to you like a bolt of literary lightning?

DJ: I lived with an image of Jacob for a long time before I heard him. I was at a friend’s hog lot and we were talking and I remember having this image of a very young boy standing over a hog he’d just killed and realizing how much power he had over life and death, a very big idea for a child. That image haunted me for a long time and I kept trying to write his story but I kept getting it wrong. I burned about 40,000 words of a draft the second time around and started from scratch. Then I woke up in the middle of the night one night and I could hear him. I could hear his story clear as day just like he was talking to me. Once that happened it was just a matter of keeping up. So it was kind of a mix of what you’re asking in that I lived with the image for a very long time, but when the story finally came I was cooking with gas.

DF: I love that your book is referred to as “Appalachian noir.” What does that term mean to you?

DJ: When I described that novel as Appalachian noir, I was adapting a term Daniel Woodrell had used to describe his novel Give Us A Kiss, which at the time he called country noir. I think Appalachia has a style that in a lot of ways is uniquely its own. There are similarities to the rest of Southern literature, but there’s a history here that is different. The landscape is different. The people view the world differently. So it was about adapting that term to fit what I was doing. At the same time, Daniel eventually came to distance himself from that term noir, and I think that’s because it has some very specific qualities that he didn’t see his work strictly adhering to. The more I interact with people who are working in that genre the more I realize that our influences aren’t always the same.

Something that’s interesting to me in these discussions, though, is that when you start mentioning people like William Gay or Larry Brown or Ron Rash, there is a general consensus that their work can be classified as noir. If you can classify those writers in that vein then you’d certainly classify McCarthy there and then you could go back to his influences, people like Faulkner or O’Connor, and classify them as noir as well. The reality is that I don’t think any of those writers were doing that intentionally. There seems to just be a lot of similarities between the grit lit that has come out of the South for so long and what has become popularized as noir currently. I don’t have a problem with classifying my work under that title, but I do think I’m rooted somewhere a bit differently. Regardless, these are the types of stories I like and the types of stories I tell, dark, often hopeless stories of working class people doing the best they can with the circumstances they’re given. If someone says something is country noir or Appalachian noir or rural noir, I’ll probably dig hell out of it.

DF: How much of yourself, and family, friends, etc., did you put into your main characters, themes, and settings?

DJ: I didn’t intentionally put any of myself in the book, but as I read back through that novel down the road I started to recognize that there are some similarities between how Jacob and I view the world. I think both of us are extremely skeptical and unwilling to put our faith in others. I think both of us are hesitant to hope for fear of things falling apart. Other than that, very little of myself or my family made it into the novel. I will say that some of the circumstances that Jacob is facing are things I witnessed around me growing up. These weren’t circumstances I personally faced, as I grew up privileged in a lot of ways. I wasn’t privileged as far as money, but I grew up in a household where my parents loved me and that’s more than I can say for a lot of the people I grew up around. A lot of the kids I grew up with were surrounded by drugs and violence very early and when you’re coming out of poverty these things tend to be glorified. That reality is something that I’m very familiar with because of where I grew up. I never had a life like Jacob’s, but I know plenty who were pretty damn close.

As for the setting, the novel is set very specifically in the county where I live. Most of the places in the novel exist. You could come here and eat at the restaurant where Maggie and Jacob have dinner. You could ride up Highway 107 and see the bouquets of flowers lining the ditch below Hamburg cemetery. You could hike in and sit at the Little Green overlook in Panthertown. I did this because I’ve just never seen the sense in creating some place and creating a name for that place only for it to be a blurred recreation of something that actually exists. I just prefer to use the landscape I know.

DF: How do you balance writing and marketing your work (i.e. book tours, engaging w readers on social media, etc.)?

DJ: Not very well, honestly. I’ve never been a very social person so the exposure is one of the hardest things for me to get over. I live in a place where you wave at folks on your drive into work in the morning and wave at the same folks as you pass on the way home that evening. The only things big around here are the mountains. So to open a magazine like Cosmopolitan or a paper like The New York Times knowing that they mention me is a tad overwhelming. The only way I can describe how it feels is like walking into a room where something really important is going on, church or a funeral or a business meeting, and everyone in the room turning to stare at you. That deer-in-headlights kind of feeling is something I’ll never get used to. But as far as balancing the marketing and the work, I try to just keep my head down and put in the hours. I’m at my happiest when I’m inside of a story. I get genuinely excited, like stand up and shadow box excited, when I get a sentence just right. The music of language is the most beautiful thing I know. When you get that type of enjoyment out of something, it’s hard when you have to do other things. At the same time, the marketing is extremely important, I’m working with a whole team of wonderful people, I get to meet some beautiful souls, and it’ll all be over before I know it. Life’s too short not to experience every emotion there is. So I count myself awfully lucky.

DF: Now that you have your first novel under your belt, what’s next?

DJ: I have a second novel finished that’ll be coming out with Putnam some time next year. We’re still playing around with a title, and there’s still a lot of work to be done in the revisions, but the manuscript is finished. As far as what happens in the book, the trigger for the narrative is that there are these two best friends, Aiden McCall and Thad Broom, who go to buy drugs and wind up witnessing the accidental suicide of their drug dealer. All of a sudden you’ve got these two addicts with piles of drugs and money dropped in their laps. But as far as what the book’s about, it really became a story about trauma. It’s about how the things we carry through our lives come to govern the choices we make. I’m really happy with it and I’m looking forward to what my editor and I can do to shape it into something big. As far as after that, I’ve got something new I’m working on. I don’t seem to be able to go very long without some character finding his way inside my head.

DF: What advice would you give to up-and-coming writers?

DJ: Persistence. That’s it. That’s the difference between people who make it and people who don’t. I wrote for a very, very long time before I ever got to anything close to something publishable. Some of the earliest writing I had was on notebook paper and I kept it in shoeboxes, and my mother called one day to see what I wanted to do with it. There was probably a thousand pages and I told her to take all of it out into the yard and set it on fire in the burn barrel. A lot of people can’t understand that, but it was the fact that I knew the writing wasn’t any good. It was important. I had to get it out of me. But once it was out, there was no other use for it. I’m probably well into 2,000 pages now and I’m still not anything close to what I would consider good. Whereas that might seem futile to some, it’s that futility that makes it so beautiful. It’s knowing that I’ll do this the rest of my life and never get it just right that makes it worthwhile. You know, Faulkner said if the artist were ever able to get it perfect, “nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide,” and I think that’s true. There just wouldn’t be anything else to do with your life.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?

DJ: If you’ve ever seen how a monkey holds onto something, that’s how I hold a pen or pencil, absolutely simian. When I sign my name, for instance, the pen or pencil is clenched in my fist. I catch hell everywhere I go about it. People think I’m some sort of freak or something.

To learn more about David Joy, check out his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @DavidJoy_Author. 

The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive

In the Business of Fiction: 11 Questions With Author Anne Leigh Parrish

Anne Leigh Parrish (Photo courtesy of the author)

By Daniel Ford

From MBA to short story artist and novelist, Anne Leigh Parrish took an unconventional path to becoming an accomplished storyteller.

Her work, which has been featured in The Virginia Quarterly Review, New Pop Lit, and Crab Orchard Review, typically features family drama, love, and humor, and has resonated with both readers and literary critics.

Parrish recently answered some of my questions about her early influences, her writing process, and her debut novel What is Found, What Is Lost.

Daniel Ford: First things first, since you’re a native of the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York, I have to know your favorite winery! 

Anne Leigh Parrish: Well, to be honest, I left that region a very long time ago, although obviously it continues to be a large presence in my fiction. I’ve lived in Washington State for more than 30 years, a place also well-known for its wine. My favorite wineries here are Columbia Crest and Chateau St. Michelle. But let me commend the Oregon and California wineries, too. From Oregon I love Willamette Valley, and from California Grghich Hills tops the list.

DF: When did you start writing? Was it something that came to you naturally or was it developed over time?

ALP: I wrote at a very early age, in elementary school. A fourth grade teacher was impressed with one of my pieces, and had me read it aloud to the class. Some of my progress reports from that time mentioned a gift for storytelling. However, I went in a different direction when I started taking piano lessons. My father bought a Baldwin baby grand piano from a store in Syracuse, and played regularly, until he moved out. He was a gifted musician, and I remember thinking that I wanted to be able to sound like him one day. For the next 10 years, my passion was all for classical music and performing, though I did manage to keep the love of writing alive through the books I read. Stressful family issues in high school made pursuing music very difficult, so I walked away from the idea of attending music school and applied to liberal arts colleges instead. I ended up majoring in Economics, a far cry from either creative writing or music, then went on to earn an MBA. By then I’d realized that I needed to get back into writing, which I did at age 27. I’ve been writing ever since.

DF: Who were some of your early influences? 

ALP: William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf because of how they manipulate language, particular Faulkner. His The Sound and the Fury absolutely fascinated me when I first read it in high school, though I didn’t really understand it fully at the time. I really admired how he time completely fluid in the first section of the book to underscore the feeble mind of Benjy. Virginia Woolf also focused hard on what an actual thought process was like, and tried to capture that in words. After those two would be Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Alice Munro. In fact, my linked story collection, Our Love Could Light the World was compared to one of her story collections by Kirkus Review. 

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline? 

ALP: No, to both. Sometimes I think I should be more dedicated to outlining, and realize that I do, in fact, outline, but mentally only. Rarely do those thoughts find their way to the page or screen. I always begin with one idea–a revelation someone has, a scene, often between two people, something unusual that I want to expand on. From there it tends to flow easily enough at this point, though not always!

DF: What’s your approach to character development? How much of yourself and your interactions with your family and friends do you put into your novels? 

ALP: In my early writing years, my characters resembled members of my family very much. My first published short story, “A Painful Shade of Blue” (Autumn 1995 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review) was based on my parents’ divorce. My mother, father, and sister were all portrayed very realistically. Even my father’s future wife, then his girlfriend, was easy to recognize. After that I wrote a long series of stories featuring a protagonist named Nina, a sort of alter-ego, who had trouble finding a focus in life. But then I moved into wholly new people, unknown to me in life. This I found much easier, because even though they were completely invented, there was no risk whatsoever that anyone would recognize himself on the page.

DF: We’re huge fans of the short story genre here at Writer’s Bone, and your second published work, Our Love Could Light the World, features 12 short stories featuring a dysfunctional family. What drew you to short stories originally and why did you make the decision to switch to the novel format with What is Found, What Is Lost? 

ALP: I’m not sure why I developed such a fondness for short stories. I guess I read a lot of William Trevor, Louise Erdrich, and, of course, Alice Munro in The New Yorker. Over time, I reached a point where I wanted more room to roam, as it were. The Dugan family, in Our Love Could Light the World, offered me this opportunity. Each story is a stand-alone piece, yet connected by the characters, and events which had taken place before. Writing a novel seemed like a logical next step to first a collection of unrelated stories, followed by a collected of linked stories. Then, frankly, there was also the marketing aspect of a novel itself. I’d long been told–and suspected–that novels sell better than story collections do.

DF: What inspired you to write your novel? Was it an idea you've been thinking about for a long time? 

ALP: I’ve been bothered by religious extremism for a long time, and this is one of the main tenets I address in the novel. Also, the first idea of the novel came in the form of a short story I wrote called “An Act of Concealment” (Crab Orchard Review). In the story, a newly married couple comes to Huron, S.D., from Constantinople where they met. This is the story of my own grandparents. My grandfather was a professor at Huron College for a brief time. My grandmother, Anna, for whom I’m named was Armenian and raised as a Catholic. My mother inherited a menorah from her, which never made sense to me, given her childhood religion. While my grandfather was Swiss and presumably a Calvinist, his last name was Jacob. I then wondered if the menorah had actually been his, that he was in fact Jewish, and asked Anna to assume that identity. This is where the reality ends and the fiction begins. Both are long dead, as is my mother, so the truth of my suspicions will never be known. But they made for the short story, and later the novel, though the novel spans four generations–Anna, her daughter Lorraine, Lorraine’s daughter’s Freddie and Holly, and. Lastly. Freddie’s daughter Beth.

DF: How long did it take you to complete What is Found, What Is Lost, and did you have to change anything about your writing process? 

ALP: I’d say it took me about 15 months. It came very easily to me. One thing that did slow me down was completely restructuring the narrative because I was concerned that my reader might have a hard time staying grounded. So I lumped scenes together by time frame. In terms my actual process, I had to work very hard to keep all the many details straight and consistent. That took a great deal of time and intense editing.

DF: Now that you have your debut novel under your belt, what’s next? 

ALP: Probably another novel. I’ve got two ideas I’m playing with at the moment. One is again multi-generational, though the women aren’t related by blood, only circumstance. The other features one protagonist, Nina, from years past, though she is more interesting now, or so I hope. I also am writing the occasional short story. I just had a new story appear in New Pop Lit called “An Angel Within.”

DF: What advice do you give to up-and-coming writers? 

ALP: My bullet points would be: Keep at it until it starts coming more easily; be open to feedback but know when the feedback is useful and when it’s not; focus on exactly what you want the reader to take away from your story (or novel); learn to switch sides of the table when you’re editing–become the reader, in other words; try not to get too hung up on how the marketplace is treating you–this is more for writers with a book out in the world; and, lastly, always stay true to yourself as a writer, how you define that.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself? 

ALP: In between high school and college I went to a local community college in Colorado and learned how to rebuild a car engine.

To learn more about Anne Leigh Parrish, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @AnneLParrish. 

The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive

Novel Artist: 10 Questions With Author Dimitry Elias Léger

Dimitry Elias Léger 
Photo Credit: Jason Liu

By Daniel Ford

Armed with a pot of coffee and Dimitry Elias Léger’s debut novel God Loves Haiti, I made it through the multiple blizzards that struck the Northeast in recent weeks without enacting Jack Torrance’s final moments in “The Shining.”

The novel is set during the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, however, there’s so much hope and warmth packed into Léger’s inventive prose and three-narrative structure that you almost forget about the overwhelming tragedy that killed more than 200,000 people and left 1.3 million Haitians homeless. If the resiliency, love, and, yes, humor, of Léger’s characters doesn’t make your heart go goudou-goudou, then you should seek medical attention immediately.

Léger kindly answered some of my questions recently about his early influences, the state of journalism, and how he put his heart and soul into God Loves Haiti.

Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

Dimitry Elias Léger: Probably when I was around 10 years old. I was a natural born raconteur who used to get in trouble inventing funny-sad stories about troublemakers to entertain my cousins in the wee hours in the morning whenever I visited them. I felt I had to publish novels after my son was born, and I began dreaming of an international career. Living abroad over the past 10 years made fiction writing the most attractive use of my writing skills as other opportunities shrunk to nothingness.

DF: Who were some of your early influences?

DEL: Arsene Lupin novels by the French author Maurice Leblanc, comic books, Prince (especially his music from "Purple Rain" to "Sign 'O' the Times" era), and Spike Lee and Steven Spielberg movies.

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

DEL: I have to turn off or tune out the world when it’s time for me to write. If I’m at home, I have to wait until my wife and children are asleep, and my friends are otherwise too busy to be online. Essentially that’s meant working most productively from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. During daytimes, I go to cafés without Internet access, and I listen to music—mostly Bjork or Latin and world music where I can’t follow the lyrics—to block out the conversations around me. I do outline, but only so I could have a sketch of the arc the novel should follow. I don’t stick to it rigidly. I like chapters to have arcs too, and I listen to the music of the writing to tell me when a chapter should end to surprise readers.

DF: What do you think of the current state of journalism and why was it something you pursued when you first started out?

DEL: In many ways the current state of journalism is similar to when I started out 20 years ago. To make a good living, command large audiences and do award-worthy stories, no matter the medium, there were only a handful of organizations that could make all those things possible. The significant difference today is the media through which you could start out before getting to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc., or Condé Nast and the big five publishers is varied. Bloggers write for the Times. Visual journalists do sophisticated on and offline. I studied journalism undergrad after two years of studying marketing. After banging my head repeatedly and futilely against the accounting course requirement for marketing majors, I decided to make life and college easier for myself by devoting myself to the one thing I did well, and easily, which was reading, reporting, and writing. Journalism was the best and easiest way to try to make money as a writer straight out of college. And you didn’t have to pass any accounting or any science courses, another Achilles’ heel, to earn that bachelor’s degree and break into magazines.

DF: Your book has an inventive structure that incorporates romance, politics, and religion in a country I think a lot of people in the U.S. might misunderstand, especially following the earthquake. How did you develop that structure and what were some of the aspects of Port-au-Prince you wanted to illuminate for readers?

DEL: I don’t mind that people might misunderstand Haiti. How many people truly understand their own countries, much less a foreign one? Besides, can countries really be understood? To me, countries are like people, families, or marriages, some basics in common, but each are as different from each other as snowflakes are to each other. The hardest thing we can do in this world is walk in other people’s shoes. In my novel, I try to seduce readers into walking in the shoes of a handful of Haitians with PTSD as they walked around and drove around Port-au-Prince and New York City. And they were a certain kind of Haitian, too, smart, self-aware patriots. My driving question was, what’s it like to love Haiti when many metrics suggest you should know better? The answers came in the zig-zag thoughts and emotions of the characters. Since love is hardly ever linear, the structure of how these people dealt with their loves in their loneliest hours emerged naturally in the form the novel ended up in.

DF: How much of yourself, and family, friends, etc., and your experiences in Haiti did you put into your main characters, themes, and settings?

DEL: I put my heart and soul into God Loves Haiti. How they were parsed out into each character, the themes, and settings of the story is beyond my ability to explain. It’s for readers to explore and hopefully make their own. Love stories are so complicated. All the characters are nothing yet a lot like me. We do share one striking trait: a love of Haiti that, like all such affairs, can be costly, risky, and ridiculous.

DF: When you finished God Loves Haiti, did you know you had something good right away and how did you go about getting it published?

DEL: Yeah, I knew I had a good, original, funny novel. Once my agent read half of it, he agreed, and then I promptly finished writing it. I suspected the process of finding a publisher would be fraught like searching for a needle in the proverbial haystack, so I didn’t want to dilly-dally in writing the book to completion. It took my agent two years to find the perfect publisher. A week after a novelist told me to hang in there because, she said, six years is the unofficial average time for a first novel to find a publisher, boom, we found a publisher. And my editor, and the entire team at Amistad/HarperCollins, were indeed perfect fits for the novel. From day one, my editor made loving and believing in my novel’s bright future with critics and readers seem like the most natural and normal of outcomes. I love her for that.

DF: Your book has gotten terrific reviews from the likes of Junot Diaz and others. Now that you have your first novel under your belt, what’s next?

DEL: Novelists far older than me with multiple novels under their belts gave me the same advice: enjoy this moment, this first year after publication, especially with the success the novel’s had, because it goes by fast. So I’m savoring, refusing to be rushed. Winning the respect of Junot and the other great writers who dug my work was a long time coming, and I dreamed of it since I first read their first published pieces 20 years ago. I intend to continue to write more novels, but I’m in no rush to stop enjoying this period, when my personal tastes coincided with those of the literary fiction reader.

DF: What advice would you give to up-and-coming writers?

DEL: Write like you’re part of a continuum of novelists. Know the history and highlights of your genre and your settings inside and out. Novelists should be like painters, building and riffing on traditions that go back centuries. Also read a lot of poetry, and poetic prose, since you are what you read. And for god’s sake, have a sense of humor.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?

DEL: My neighborhood in Haiti was the epicenter of the earthquake.

To learn more about Dimitry Elias Léger, visit his official website, like his Facebook, or follow him on Twitter @dimitry3000. 

The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive

Cover Fire: 11 Questions With Author Anthony Breznican

Anthony Breznican

By Daniel Ford

I included Anthony Breznican’s terrific debut novel Brutal Youth in our January book recommendations, and I still think you should buy it immediately (if nothing else, that cover brings class and style to every bookshelf).   

Breznican kindly agree to an interview and talked to me about his writing process, the state of the magazine business, the origins of Brutal Youth, and his love and admiration for badass writer Stephen King.

Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

Anthony Breznican: When I was 12 years old, I tried to talk every adult I knew into taking me to see a horror movie called "Pet Sematary." My grandmother, who was always encouraging me to read more, said, “You know, that’s based on a book by a guy named Stephen King. How about if I buy you the book?” I was bummed beyond belief. A stupid book? Well …that ratty paperback, which I still have on my desk shelf, was terrifying, shocking, and surprisingly beautiful in its emotion. I was hooked. I wanted to write scary stories like Stephen King, so I set about filling spiral-bound notebooks with ghost stories and monster tales. I loved the power of writing. When you’re a kid, everybody tells you what to do. Your day-to-day life isn’t really your own. But when you write, anything is possible. You just have to make it convincing.

DF: Who were some of your early influences?

AB: King, obviously, was a huge influence. I see his fingerprints all over Brutal Youth. I love his twisted sense of humor, as well as the love he has for his characters, even the angry, destructive ones. I was also deeply influenced by Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. He is telling a story about man’s inhumanity to man, but he underlined the tragedy with absurdity. With Brutal Youth, I also wanted to tell a war story, three freshmen trying to survive at a perilous and crumbling Catholic high school, but I tried to infuse it with the kind of humor you sometimes find in the midst of deep dark trouble. Michael Chabon was also a writer whose ink I would like to mainline; he’s a fellow Pittsburgh kid who found a way to harness words into stories that simultaneously make you laugh, make you cry, and make you mad.

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

AB: I don’t outline. I daydream a lot, get the story in my head, and then I set down to write it. Sometimes I go wandering on the page and get lost, necessitating some rewrite backtracking later; other times I hit upon happy surprises that I wouldn’t have found if I’d stuck to a map.

Music is important. I shift perspectives between a lot of different characters in Brutal Youth, to show the reader what they are thinking and intending, even if the other characters don’t know, so I tend to have a few songs that put me in the mood of those individuals. For the thieving priest, it was Bob Seger’s “Still the Same,” for the main character, a freshman named Peter Davidek, it was Elvis Costello’s mournful “Favourite Hour,” which gives the book it’s title (“Now there’s a tragic waste of brutal youth…”). For Davidek’s combative, wounded friend Noah Stein, it was Nirvana’s “Even In His Youth.” Music was how I found their moods.

DF: As someone who was trained as a journalist and made a living at it for a couple of years, I have to ask what you think of the current state of journalism, and why was it something you pursued when you first started out?

AB: I grew up wanting to write fiction, but I also loved storytelling of all kinds. In college, the school newspaper was a place to get published, and I hoped it would provide some useful discipline. It was exciting to be part of a breaking news operation, and the University of Pittsburgh’s student paper was a daily operation that actually covered some heavy and important topics. I was a news reporter (later editor, because everyone at a school paper gets promoted fast as the leadership changes year to year) but never dabbled much in entertainment coverage. That was also helpful later because I think it made me try to find deeper topics in pop culture reporting. When I started my career with the Associated Press, it was in general news—wildfires, plane crashes, politics, protests, etc .—but I was also working in Los Angeles, which is a company town for the entertainment industry, so I ended up doing a few actor profiles and covering things like the Emmys and Oscars. It was fun, and I think I was drawn to creative people so that became the main event. After all those years telling the stories of other storytellers, Brutal Youth is a chance to tell one of my own.

DF: Related to those questions, how’s the magazine biz?!

AB: It’s in flux. We’re trying to figure out the future, which is hard for the journalism industry because we’re used to reporting what we know for sure, not making predictions. The good news is that more people are reading than ever before. I hope the advertising finds a way to shift to digital and the audience makes the leap to tablets instead of paper. I like the tactile feel of a magazine, but if we didn’t have to print and ship all those pages we could reduce a lot of expense that could be spent on the journalism. I look forward to the day when publishing means pushing a button, not running a press and sending out an army of trucks.

DF: What made you start writing Brutal Youth? Was it an idea you've been thinking about for a long time, or did the story and structure strike you like a bolt of literary lightening?  

AB: It was something I ruminated on for a long time. It’s about good kids trying to stay that way in a corrupt place, and some adults who got lost making the same journey, but I was really inspired by experiences I had as an adult. As a kid, you expect to get pushed around, and you develop your scorn for authority there. Then you grow up and realize that bullying and manipulation never fully go away. It’s a part of human nature. So I thought a high school setting would be a great place to explore the forces that shape and warp us for the rest of our lives. Everyone feels heartbreak, everyone feels betrayed, and everyone also feels tremendous, overwhelming loyalty to the people who stick by the in hard times. So why do some people take their pain and dump it on others while some take their pain and say, “It stops with me?” Those were ideas that got me interested in going back to high school in this novel.

DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your main characters? How did your high school experiences shape the events your main characters go through (both painful and funny)?

AB: A lot of the trials and tribulations in the book were taken from real life at my actual Catholic high school in Western Pennsylvania. We had a priest who was later discovered to have stolen nearly $1.5 million from the church, and I couldn’t resist making use of a real-life villain like that. We also had sanctioned hazing, and the bigger kids tormented the younger kids mercilessly. In front of the adults, it tended to take the form of sing-songy fun and games, but on the bus ride home and in the halls when no one was looking it was a terrifying and sometimes ridiculous survival game. Even some of the teachers were afraid of the students, but we all wore blazers and ties or plaid skirts and cardigans, so we looked like little angels. What I wanted Brutal Youth to reflect was the intense friendships I had at that time, foxhole friendships, the kind you share with someone when the whole world is against you. Emotions at that age are turned up to full volume, but I think the love you have for your friends rings the loudest.

DF: When you finished Brutal Youth, did you know you had something good right away, and how did you go about getting it published?

AB: I still don’t know! I don’t think a writer ever does. Whenever people on social media send out a message that they've picked it up, I feel like a stage-parent: “Someone is reading you! Be a good book! Be good!!” I look at it sometimes and feel overwhelming affection and pride, and hope the parts I love mean something to someone else. Other times I look at the book and feel shame and anger, wishing I could write it again. I got it published the usual way with lots of queries, lots of rejections. The only thing I know for sure is that I poured my heart into the story and did the best I could. It makes me happy when other people find it an exciting and worthwhile adventure.

DF: Brutal Youth has gotten some great reviews, including quite the endorsement from Stephen King. Now that you have your first novel under your belt, what’s next?

AB: Given what I’ve already told you about King and what he means to me as a reader, you can imagine what a happy-dance day it was when he 1.) agreed to let me send him the galley, and 2.) wrote back to say he liked it and would be willing to offer a vouch for the front and back. I’ve never met him, but if I ever do he better watch out because a gigantic bear-hug is coming. Now that I have one book out, the dream of every first-timer is the same: please, let me do this again. Writing a book is like riding a roller coaster, and I’m one of those people who is eager to get back in line.

DF: What advice would you give to up-and-coming writers?

AB: Don’t be afraid of sucking. There will be plenty of time for that fretting later. Get your first draft done, and don’t look back until you type “the end.” Make it as good as you can, of course, and repair and adjust as needed along the way, but don’t despair over it. Once you get a first draft finished, you have something to fix. Until then, you have nothing.

DF: What is one random fact about yourself?

AB: Jesus, this is the hardest question of the bunch. A random fact…? Hm. Okay, I have a silver frog ring that I’ve worn since I was 16 years old. It’s not worth anything, but it’s kind of cool. I change all the time, but it stays mostly the same. I’ve lost it several times—it slipped off my finger once while throwing a snowball and another time playing beach volleyball, and another time when I gave it to a girl I was crazy about—but it always finds its way back to me. It only has three legs because of a casting error, but I like that. I’m not altogether there either.

To learn more about Anthony Breznican, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @Breznican.

The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive

Author On The Rise: 9 Questions With Paula Hawkins

Paula Hawkins
Photo credit: Kate Neil

By Daniel Ford

For a two-week span, I couldn’t turn around without some mention of Paula Hawkins’ novel, The Girl on the Train.

The book, which revolves around a voyeuristic commuter, was reviewed more than favorably in The New York Times Review of Books and earned a gushing feature in Entertainment Weekly. One reviewer even said that the debut thriller is “better than Gone Girl.”

Hawkins recently answered some of my questions about her love of creativity, her early influences, and how the idea for The Girl on the Train originated. Owing to the book’s reception, and the passion in which Hawkins talked about her craft, I’d wager readers should be prepared to make plenty of room on their bookshelves for what she comes up with next.   

Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to be a writer, or was it a desire that built up over time?

Paula Hawkins: I loved creative writing as a child. English Literature was always one of my better subjects. Later on, I decided I wanted to go into journalism. I lived in Africa as a child. My father was an academic but he also wrote quite a bit for the papers, and he knew lots of journalists, who used to visit the house often. They were always interesting people who told amazing stories. They made me want to write.

I had dreams of being an intrepid foreign correspondent, but it turned out I wasn’t really brave enough, so I wrote about business and finance in London instead. I wrote fiction on the side, secretly, for myself. It wasn’t until relatively recently that I began showing my writing to others. I thoroughly enjoyed being a journalist, but I never lost the desire to create, to make things up rather than to record.

DF: Who were some of your early influences?

PH: Agatha Christie introduced me to the crime novel, and much later Donna Tartt showed me the possibilities of the thriller with The Secret History. Then of course there are the great books that you read at school, that you know better than any others; novels such as Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, The Outsider by Albert Camus, and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.

DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?

PH: I write in silence. I do outline; I’d be too nervous to just start writing without a sense of where I was going to end up. That said, there are surprises as you go along—characters change and develop, they become different people from the ones you thought they were going to be.

DF: Where did the idea for The Girl on the Train originate? Was it something you’d been thinking about for a long time, or did it come to you like a bolt of literary lightning?

PH: The germ of the idea, of a commuter seeing something shocking from their daily commute, had been in my head for years. The character of Rachel, the woman with a drinking (and associated memory) problem, had been in my head for a bit, too. It wasn’t until I put the two things together, until I put Rachel on the train, that the idea coalesced and became something I knew I could write.

DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your main characters?

PH: There are small bits of me in all the women in The Girl on the Train (and possibly in a couple of the men, too). But the main the characters are works of the imagination.

DF: When you finished your first draft, did you know you had something good, or did you have to go through multiple rounds of edits to realize you had something you felt comfortable taking to readers?

PH: I never know whether something’s any good or not! I wrote about a third of the book before showing it to my agent and her assistant, both of whom I trust completely. They were really excited about it, so that got me excited, too.

DF: Your book has gotten some rave reviews from the likes of The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly and was optioned by Dreamworks. Now that you have your first novel under your belt, what’s next?

PH: I’m writing my second book at the moment. I’m not talking about it too much just yet though. It centers on the relationship between two sisters, one of whom is dead at the beginning of the book. It has quite a gothic feel, I think.

DF: Whose work should aspiring thriller writers be reading right now?

PH: Oh god, there are so many, and it really depends what sort of thing interests you. If spy thrillers and international terrorist plots are your thing, try Terry Hayes’ I Am Pilgrim. If you are more interested in dangers lurking closer to home, The Silent Wife by ASA Harrison, Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty, or How to Be A Good Wife by Emma Chapman are chillingly brilliant. If you appreciate a book with a broader social context, I’d try So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman, or Long Way Home by Eva Dolan. Or if you’re in the market for a literary mystery, the Jackson Brodie novels written by Kate Atkinson are close to perfect.

DF: What advice would you give writers just starting out?

PH: Perseverance is all, and whenever you’re feeling disheartened, read On Writing by Stephen King. He knows of what he speaks, and he’s really funny, too.

To learn more about Paula Hawkins, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @PaulaHWrites. 

The Writer's Bone Interviews Archive