Jefferson Smith, author of Strange Places, has spent most of the last 30 years studying and practicing three different passions: computer programming, creativity theory, and a variety of artistic fields, including music composition, creative writing, animation, and cartooning.
He sits down with fellow StoryBundler Geoff Morrison to discuss writing, writing, writing, sitting down and writing some more... and drinking.
Strange Places is a contemporary fantasy story about a young orphan girl who discovers that she may never have been an orphan at all, and sets out to learn the truth about her place in the world.
With my first book, I set out to create a world and characters that my teen daughters would love and respect. I wanted to give them a strong female hero to look up to, but I also wanted that character to feel like an actual teen and have the sort of humor and intelligence they could identify with. My second book is a sequel to the first, so I am trying to capture the same feel, but there are two new stakeholder groups in my life that were not there for Book 1: In addition to my daughters, I now have a growing army of fans who have fallen in love with the characters, so I need to keep their emotional stakes in mind. And perhaps more oddly, I now also have to serve the needs of the characters themselves. With Book 1, the characters were in the process of becoming people to me, but now they are people, and I find that I have less say in Book 2 over how characters should respond to their world. I don’t mean this in a touchy-feely “I channel the voices of my characters” kind of way. What I mean is that I have less freedom to invent now, because the characters are more completely established personalities. I have to be faithful to what I made them into and cannot pervert that for my own whims.
The biggest thing I’ve learned is to trust my creative wellspring. I used to keep copious notes of things a character might later want to say, or jokes they could tell, etc. But I’ve found that when I need a character to say something funny, or profound, or whatever, I usually don’t have a problem coming up with something on the spot. So I’ve stopped keeping extensive notes and clippings, and rely almost entirely now on my creative process to deliver what’s needed, and when.
To date, my process has been a messy one. I create very approximate outlines of major events, and then write a story that delivers on them. Then I pull that story apart, criticize the hell out of it, and write a new one based on the first draft, but without all the stupid or boring sections.
Then repeat.
With each iteration, my outline gets more detailed, and my writing gets tighter. I hope one day to get a book done in fewer than 5 drafts, but so far, it looks like that’s my process.
In addition to considering their backstory, I usually define one or two key elements of a character’s attitude. Are they snarky and critical? Supportive and loving? Analytical and closed? From there, I fill in the rest as I write. I don’t like to over-define a character’s personality up front, because I want them to fit into the role I’m giving them, so I prefer to discover the more specific details of their makeup as I get into the writing.
For each character, I have a role-model in mind: Sometimes a real person, or a fictional character, or possibly a pastiche of several of the above. As part of that, I consider speech patterns and psychology. But once I’ve written a few scenes for them, I find that it ceases being a conscious process, and I just start riffing in their voice.
Pacing is something I don’t pay a lot of attention to at the beginning. My first few drafts tend to be divided into different story lines, which I write one at a time. In a later draft, once I think I’ve got each character’s story worked out, I interleave the story lines into a single novel, and that’s the time when I give attention to the overall pacing, building up the pacing of the final novel by picking and choosing which scenes to go to next from the various threads I’m weaving together.
I believe it violates a trust for a POV character to know something but to simply fail to think it during a scene in which they hold the POV. Consequently, my rule is that anything the POV character knows that is relevant to the situation should be revealed. This means that if I want to withhold information from the reader, to heighten the surprise of a later reveal, or stretch out the dramatic tension of not knowing, then I cannot put the POV into the hands of a character who knows the information I want to hold back.
Choosing what to reveal, and when, can be a complex decision, influenced by pacing and dramatic tension, as well as by how much has already been revealed. It’s something you have to develop a feel for.
I believe in a less-is-more philosophy. Many writers – especially those who invest heavily in world-building – write long passages of rich description. Personally, as a reader, I find those boring and a waste of my time. I don’t care what shape the groove on the cornice of the second building is. You had me at “a second building.” Move on.
In my view, the reader will flood-fill a scene with all kinds of details, based on even the sketchiest of hints. If I write a line that says “the concrete walls were flaked from years of dampness,” my reader’s inner eye will fill in all kinds of additional detail for free: mold, slime, garbage, bad lighting, rat droppings, stale air, the scent of mildew, an old mattress lying in the corner, etc. So if they’ve already done so, what do I gain by repeating it? Sure, my reader’s damp concrete world might be different from mine, but who cares? The only additional details I will bother to relate are ones that are essential to the story. If the hero is about to get face-washed by a broken pipe of super-heated steam, then I will add the presence of those steam pipes in my description, but that’s it. Your damp basement is every bit as valid as mine.
So, bottom line, my reader’s imagination is my best ally, and the more description I give, the LESS his subconscious will participate in establishing the illusion.
No. I have actually WRITTEN music as part of my creative process, to give me a feel for what a culture sounds like, or how they think, but I don’t listen to anything at all while I’m writing. (Not even the stuff I composed myself for the project.) Partly it’s because I don’t stay in any one scene, chapter or mood for very long, so managing music to suit the work would become a major time interruption.
The other reason is because I write genre fiction. What music would I play to set the mood for an underground cavern on a world populated by intelligent spiders? The worlds I build are all in my head. Music from Earth merely serves to pull me back here when I should be out there.
I write in my bedroom office about half the time, and at my treadmill desk the other half. The “third half” is done on walkabout. I’ll take my laptop and go to a coffee shop or the library. Just some place different where I can surround myself with the bustle of people.
Both. I don’t emphasize editing while I’m writing, but I can’t abide a passage that doesn’t flow, so I will often revisit a previous paragraph to touch it up. Part of me worries that with all the rewrites I do, I’m wasting a lot of time, but I’ve come to realize that immersing myself in the scenes for a bit longer while I nip and tuck also helps me to discover the heart of the scene – a heart that I may not have recognized during the initial writing pass.
Beginners talk a lot about inspiration, but I don’t know any working writers who do. I think that’s one of the major difference between a beginner and a pro. The beginner glorifies the writing process and feels that brilliance can only strike when the sun is just so and the wind is from the east. A pro just sits bum in chair and does it. Day in and day out.
To the newbie, I think the sheer wonder of the worlds they have read about intimidates them, and they believe that to be that brilliant themselves will take some combination of divine inspiration, once-in-a-lifetime insight, and a whole pile of luck. But the truth is, those worlds of wonder books they read? They were probably written by some Joe Writer who not inspired by a heavenly muse. He was writing for a living. That’s not to say that inspiration and wonder are not part of the process, but for every minute of eureka, there are another ten hours of grunt equity needed to bring that eureka moment to life. So capture your great ideas when they come, but in between, don’t just sit on your hands and moon about it. Writing is a job, and you still have lots of work to do.
My standards as a reader. Case in point, I am now working on the fourth draft of my current WIP. And just yesterday I decided to throw out an entire sub-plot and come up with something new. It wasn’t fun enough. It sounded good when I first came up with it, but it was taking the story and the characters in directions that just weren’t coming together with the others in the way that I’d hoped. So I’m chucking it. There are some writers who seek to live on quantity. They try to pump out as many books as they can, and so they spend as little time on each one as they feel they can justify. There is certainly a market for those kinds of stories, and I don’t begrudge them that choice, but first and foremost, I write to please my harshest critic – me. So whenever this critic can see something that isn’t working, or doesn’t seem good enough, he tells me. This usually causes me to sigh, and gnash my teeth, and scream all sorts of obscenities at him. Then I remove the bit he pointed at and rewrite it.
And that takes time.
I have 5 tiers of readers. First tier is a single person – usually one of my daughters – who acts as a sounding board. She knows all my plot and character ideas intimately, often before I’ve even started writing. She serves as a sort of sounding board - almost a writing partner. I find that my best ideas usually emerge through conversation, so I need a trusted accomplice who I can talk to and who I know will not spill the beans.
My second tier of readers are my wife and remaining daughters. They get to read a draft when I think the story is mostly there, but may still need some structural tweaking.
Tier 3 is my editor, who will get to see a draft only after I’m happy with where things are going and my family has had their input.
Tier 4 are my beta readers – selected from friends and fans who have given me good feedback in the past. I usually keep this to 4 or 5 people, although I may do more than one round of beta revisions, depending on the reactions I get.
Tier 5, of course, are my general readers. Not only do they often find things that all the others of us managed to miss before the book was published, but they also provide fabulous input that I store up and use for subsequent books. There are at least 3 things in my current WIP that grew out of suggestions or observations made by fans who read Book 1.
To date, I’ve done my own covers. I worked for a time as a cartoonist and have moonlighted on small-budget projects as a graphic designer before. So that gives me far more confidence than I probably deserve when it comes to doing my own cover design. In truth, I don’t think I’m any good at it, but it is taking me forever to come to terms with that fact. Although there is hope in the near future. Just last week I began collaborating with a new cover designer in my community. She’s only in highschool but I’m completely blown away by some samples she sent me of her work, so we’re trying a collaboration on a cover for a short-story I’ll be releasing soon. And if that works out, I may offer her the cover of my next self-published novel, too.
When I was a kid, I loved Heinlein and Tolkien, but beyond those two, I never really developed a longstanding passion for any one author. There are some series that I have loved, and some authors who have provided more than one of my cherished series, but by and large, I tend to fall in love with individual books or series now, more than with authors. But if I were to cite my strongest influences, I would list Heinlein, Tolkien, Orson Scott Card, Stephen King, Larry Niven, Anne McCaffery, Ursula Leguin, and a few more.
“What are you drinking?”
Seriously. There is surely lots that I don’t know – things that my favorite authors could tell me if I asked, but most of that I can learn on my own by simply studying their work. The few things that I can’t figure out on my own this way are likely so vast or subtle that it would take weeks for them to clue me in. So if I get the chance for that one question, I’ll ask what they’re drinking, and then buy one for them and leave them alone to write more good books. Or to relax in their time away from doing so. They don’t need a newbie like me crushing their down time.
My list of all-time favorite books includes: Life of Pi, Fight Club, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Yes. Immediate Fiction by Jerry Cheaver and of course, Stephen King’s On Writing.
This is what I tell all my writing students, and anybody who asks about writing: Learn what a premise is, come up with a good premise, write a story to deliver on that premise, and keep writing until it is done.
I have used many, many software tools over the years, and I’ve even written some of my own, but after years of such experiments, I have finally decided that Scrivener is the best tradeoff between versatility, power, and usability, so it’s the only tool I use today. For the writing part. But writing is more than just word-smithing. I find that I need to draw lots of diagrams, visualizing my characters, visualizing plot lines, etc. So I use a tool called FlashFace to sketch the faces of my characters, and I use the Gimp and Inkscape extensively for other drawing and visualizing activities.
Other than the site that describes the technical parameters of the EPUB format, no. I’m a programmer. EPUB is just another programming language to me, only easier.
Yes, probably, but most writers are not programmers, so my tricks would probably scare the hell out of them. “Begin by unpacking your EPUB into a directory hierarchy, and then open the manifest file in a binary editor and...”
Yes, I do. Strange Places is published by Indie Ink Publishing, an independent micro-publisher. They handle production design, layout, editing, printing, warehousing, distribution, marketing etc., so I leave all the print-related issues to them.
Yes, I sell on all platforms that I know about. I have done very well in print and on StoryBundle. In third place, sales on Kobo and Kindle are roughly equal.
I have not yet explored KDP Select. I have nothing against it, but I’m more interested in getting my next book written than I am in fine tinkering one the marketing and sales fronts.
Personal appearances are by far the most beneficial and rewarding work I’ve done so far. I sell more print books at a public speaking engagement or a high-school workshop in one afternoon than I sell online in a month. And even better, I get to make contact with actual readers and fans.
StoryBundle was a fabulous experience, and I loved every minute of it. The bundle itself was a significant bump in sales for me, especially since my book has been out for two years now and is getting a bit long in the tooth. But in addition to sales, I have also seen a significant uptick in reviews posted to GoodReads, and to people registering for my newsletter. I attribute all of this bump to my participation in the bundle.
Jefferson Smith is an inventor of worlds, founder of religions, crusher of hopes and dreams, rescuer of small children: all in a day’s work for a fantasy novelist. Despite a lifetime of dabbling in serious things like technology (a PhD in computer science and creativity theory) and Hollywood animation, his first passion has always been writing. If he was allowed to write his own reviews, the words ”irreverent,” “thought-provoking,” and “funny” would get used a lot. But don’t trust him on that. After all, “I tell lies for a living.” You can find him on his website Creativity Hacker, or follow him on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Scribd, or GoodReads.
Geoffrey Morrison is a freelance writer and editor. His first novel, Undersea, was featured in the first StoryBundle. You can follow him on Twitter @TechWriterGeoff.
