How About This - a three way interview

In which the author responds to questions from two great Substackers

Today I’m participating in a three way interview experiment. Bryn (newsletter) and Alison (newsletter) and I are asking each other questions and posting the responses in our respective newsletters. I invite you to check out their newsletters (they are great) and their own answers, too!

Bryn’s questions:

1. What is the one writing prop/tool you can’t live without and why?

It’s funny you should mention that:  In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield describes a whole ritual he goes through before writing, including his lucky work boots and even a little toy cannon he places in front of himself so he can be “shot” by inspiration while writing.  Sometimes I think I should do something similar, have a memorable starting ritual.

For me, if I have a notebook or journal with good paper and a decent pen, that’s all I need.  Well, that and a computer for publishing…  But I am considering buying a toy cannon.

2. If you were given the chance to meet any fictional character, who would it be and why?

The Doctor: at least 30 minutes with each of his or her incarnations. They would have the best stories.

3. What’s something everyone else finds overrated that you secretly love?

This is a harder question to answer then if I had to pick something that was underrated!

In terms of television, I’d have to say Friends and The Big Bang Theory.  They both have a barge load of flaws (Friends in particular in the way it deals with LGBTQ topics, traditional gender roles and fat shaming; TBBT in some of its treatment of nerds/geeks, LGBTQ topics, plus the characters of Howard and Raj in particular) but the comedy aspects are great when they are working and there are some great emotional beats in both series. 

Phoebe Buffet is one of the great comic characters on TV, let’s acknowledge this. 

And as silly and immature as Sheldon Cooper could be, I think Jim Parsons deserves a lot of credit for giving Sheldon more depth over time – in a believable way - given the limited emotional range of his character and the trauma of his youth that he bottled away under the Sheldon persona.

I would also say that in the case of Friends the characters do grow over time and in some ways become less cringey (Chandler’s reconciliation with his father and the “what if” episodes which establish that Chandler and Monica would still become a couple even if she didn’t lose a lot of weight).  

In the case of TBBT, Howard does eventually become a loving if immature husband and father, Stewart settles into a positive relationship, as do most of the main characters.  Poor Raj is still the butt of many jokes, though, even at the end of the series.

On the other hand… Seinfeld has not aged well, the characters do not grow.  At all.

4. Cursive writing - important skill to learn or dead art?

I’m biased by my upbringing and life experience:  I’m a huge fan of cursive.  I use it a lot even today for taking notes during meetings.  I’m disappointed that most children don’t get to learn it in school any more.  I think (or hope) that cursive will make a comeback within the next 20 years.

5. What does your ideal writing/reading nook look like?

A desk and a good chair, with a sofa just in case; tons of bookshelves and lots of desk space/places to pile books, papers, etc.  Good natural light would be nice but not mandatory.  Actually, to be ideal a fully stocked kitchen should be nearby!

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Alison’s questions:

6.     What is the first book you remember reading?

Wow, this is tougher than I thought.  I have vague recollections about reading Richard Scarry books or books featuring the Sesame Street characters but they didn’t make a huge impression on me. 

The first book that made a huge impression on me was A Friend for Growl Bear, when I was 6 or 7 years old.  Poor Growl Bear scared everyone he met because all he could do was growl and he was very sad because he just wanted to make friends.  This in turn made me sad and I woke up crying one night because I felt so bad for poor Growl Bear.

7. You’re in a magical coffee shop with all of the possible drinks you could order available to you. What do you order, and why?

If I HAVE to order a hot caffeinated beverage, probably French Vanilla coffee or a cappuccino…  actually, I’d like to try a Klingon Raktajino (their version of coffee), although I expect it would be damned strong. 

8. What are you looking forward to this summer?

The warmth and sunlight more than anything else.  I love the long days (writing this on June 22 so we’ve already hit our peak for longest day of the year).  I need to kick myself in the butt and get outside and walking more.  I like the smells of summer, especially cut grass (which, incidentally, is actually a sign that the grass plants are under distress!) And more BBQing.

9. What does the saying “touch grass” mean to you?

I think this means making a physical connection (literally touching the grass) to something solid and real.  Knowledge workers, perhaps academics included, live in worlds of models, procedures and processes that represent an ideal situation as opposed to what’s really happening.  I think it’s important to be able to stand back, take a time out, if you will, and reconnect to the physical world and reality in general. 

Restated: to get out of your head and your assumptions and instead assess what the real situation is.

10. Do you have an unfinished writing project? Or an unstarted one? What is it, and what do you think your barriers are to working on it?

So many unfinished projects.  Far more unfinished than finished, it’s kind of embarrassing. 

I did start a science fiction novel about 3 – 4 years ago during NaNoWriMo and generated about 120 pages of material, which in my mind represents the first third of what could be the first in a series of novels.  I didn’t extensively plot the novel in advance but I did have an idea of the concept, the characters and where it should be going in terms of story.

I hit the NaNoWriMo wordcount goal, which was a fun achievement.  But every time I go back to the novel I feel scared and discouraged because while I know there are some interesting seeds and beats in what I’ve written so far, it will be a huge amount of work to even turn it into a proper first draft.  It has lots of horrible dialogue and concepts that shouldn’t survive, yet at the same time the world I’ve started to create feels very spare and hollow in places. 

I feel I need to return that that world someday and finish the story.  I would just have to take it a piece at a time and recognize that there’s a lot of work ahead.  And also that I might just have to radically rewrite… all of it.

Oddly enough, another story which never got finished is similar in concept to the new TV series Severance, although my story played around more with the flow of time and time travel.

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Thanks to Bryn and Alison for their great questions!

Update: Alison’s interview is up!

Update: Bryn’s interview is up!