Frequently asked questions, cobbled together from various interviews...
Q: Who were your favorite authors growing up? Which books or
authors
were most influential? Who are the current authors you read?
What is your
ULTIMATE favorite book ever(if you have one) and why?
My favorite authors growing up were Heinlein, Clarke, Bester,
Asimov, Bradbury, all at various times. I went through a lot
of poetry,
especially the Romantics. Was addicted to James Bond for years.
I sort of let my wife recommend sf books for me; she reads a
lot of them.
Teaching sf writing has made it harder for me to read it, because
I'm
intensely critical. A couple of mistakes and I quietly put a
book down
and usually don't get back to it.
I can only think of three living writers whose books I'll buy
sight
unseen: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Diane Ackerman, and an obscure
poet, Billy Collins, who blows me away every time. I always
enjoy
Gardner Dozois's Best SF of the Year collection.
I guess my ultimate favorite book ever, assuming you mean fiction,
is Garcia Marquez's _Love in the Time of Cholera_. I always
enjoy
leafing through Ernest Hemingway's short stories, and Ray Carver's,
and have read _Treasure Island_ at least a dozen times.
Q: Do you read a lot?
All the time, but not a lot of fiction.
Q: Where do you draw your ideas from? Are you one of those authors
that
has an endless supply? Do you keep notes on ideas?
Ideas just come to you. If you don't get ideas, you can't be
much of a
science fiction writer. I do actually have a cigar box labeled "Crackpot
Ideas," and I sort through that every now and then. I always
have
computer files of notes, more or less organized, for the current
novel(s).
I've written three books of short stories -- INFINITE DREAMS,
DEALING IN FUTURES, and NONE SO BLIND -- and in the
introduction or afterword to each story I tried to say something
about how it came to be written. Here's a list of where I remembered
my ideas as having come from:
- editorial suggestions -- 7
- stylistic experiments -- 7
- personal emotional trauma/experience
-- 6
- personal physical trauma/experience -- 6
- out of nowhere/just
started typing -- 5
- works of other writers -- 4
- challenge by another writer --
4
- joke -- 3
- magazine articles -- 3
- the weather -- 2
- for the hell of it -- 2
- cover painting -- 1
- typo -- 1
Maybe it's interesting that so many of them were generated by
editorial suggestions. That's when a magazine editor calls you
up in
the middle of the night and says he needs a 5000-word story about
the sex life of salami by Wednesday.
Most such stories are done purely for money, of course, or as
a favor
to the editor, but the odd thing is that they don't necessarily
turn out
to be inferior to the ones that originate otherwise. One of
my two
Hugo-winning short stories, "Tricentennial," was completely
controlled by capricious editorial factors.
Q: What do you do when you experience writer's block?
When I get writer's block I try to get around it by writing _about_
the
story, rather than writing the story. Sometimes it works. Sometimes
you just have to go write something else for a while.
Q: How much do you have to know about a story before you start
writing?
I don't have to know very much about the story to start writing.
Just
an interesting person in an interesting situation. Often you
start writing
to see what's going to happen.
Q: What kind of editing process do you go through?
The editor makes suggestions, and (I guess obviously) they fall
into
three groups: things that you think will help the story, things
that don't
make
any real difference, and things that you think are wrong. You
thank her for
the
first ones, usually go along with the second, and dig in on the
third.
Q: Have you ever had bad editing experiences? Why or why not?
I'm never wild about changing my precious manuscript, but sometimes
the editor _is_ right. I think my worst editing experience was
my first
novel. (I later found out it was the editor's first, too.)
The viewpoint
character was an undereducated Oklahoman, and he spoke like one.
The editor changed all of his dialogue into standard English.
I
changed it back, word by word.
Q: Why choose science fiction as a medium to write in? What
characteristics
make it right for you?
I didn't so much choose sf as sf chose _me_ -- it was almost
all I'd read
as a kid, so it was natural to start writing it.
I like the freedom to write about anything. I like making a
living at it.
Q: What were some obstacles that you had to overcome when you
decided to
become a writer, and first started writing?
I really didn't have a hard time getting started. Seems to be
true of a significant minority of writers. First novel sold
to the first publisher who
saw it.
Q: What are some obstacles that hinder you now that you are
an established
writer? What do you find most difficult about writing and how
do you get
around it?
Most of the obstacles are internal. You want each book to be
your
best shot. You don't want to repeat yourself or start parodizing
yourself,
which happened to writers as brilliant as Heinlein and Hemingway.
I don't find writing difficult. Just slow. I guess the biggest
difficulty is
distractions.
Q: What kind of advice do you offer writers who are just beginning,
or
people who want to write?
The old saw "don't do it unless you absolutely have to" is true
enough, if by "it" you mean devoting your life to writing and
hoping
for success or even a living. Of course if writing gives you
pleasure,
and you don't have lofty ambitions, go for it. I think the creation
of
any art, even mediocre art, helps balance a person; helps him
or her
understand and enjoy life.
(I fool around with music and painting in this spirit. I'll
never find
fame or fortune with guitar or brush, but don't expect to.
Both
activities are vital to my life nevertheless.)
Q: Of all the works you've written, which are your favourites?
Why?
My favorite of my works is the Worlds trilogy, because
it's the most ambitious and best realized. I also am fond of
_The Hemingway Hoax_, because it's funny, in its sardonic way.
I'd like to write more humor.
Q: What was the background of THE HEMINGWAY HOAX?
The Hemingway Hoax started out as the result of a casual conversation
with an ex-student of mine. He¹d driven my wife and me to
an airport, and while we were killing time waiting for the flight,
I told him the true story about Hemingway¹s lost manuscripts.
In 1923, Hemingway¹s wife Hadley had packed up all of his
writings -- three years¹ worth -- and left the bag unattended
on a train. They were stolen.
I commented to my student that someone with a real gift for literary
imitation, an old typewriter, and no morals could make a million
bucks faking those lost manuscripts. Almost immediately the safer
alternative occurred to me: settle for less than a million and
write a book about a guy who attempts the fake.
I started the outline for The Hemingway Hoax the next morning,
in Tahiti, and finished it on Heron Island in Australia¹s
Great Barrier Reef. Then I put it away and resumed work on the
book that would become Buying Time.
I wrote most of The Hemingway Hoax at home in Gainesville, Florida,
and Boston, but parts of it were written in Austria and New Zealand.
Most of the book takes place in Key West, so when I was approaching
the end of it I drove down to the island, and finished the book
in a hotel room not far from where Hemingway lived.
What is the book about? The subtitle ³A Short Comic Novel
of Existential Terror² is accurate. In a way, it¹s
a horror novel tinged with ghastly humor, as the apparently insane
ghost of Ernest Hemingway murders a helpless scholar over and
over; the scholar slipping from one universe to the next each
time he dies, in what is apparently a rather unpleasant form
of serial immortality. The tongue-in-cheek explanations for how
this could happen qualify the book as a science fiction novel.
There¹s also a level of literary comment, about Hemingway
as a man and as a writer; about how and why fiction is written
and read. To a small minority of readers, this might be the most
interesting aspect of the book. I¹ve taken some pains, though,
to make sure it doesn¹t slow down the narrative. People
who've read the book in manuscript all remark about how fast-paced
it is. It may be the most ³literary² of my books, but
it also has the most explicit sex and the most gruesome violence
I¹ve ever written. Nobody will be bored by it.
Q: You do a lot of travelling. Do you write while you're on
the road?
Almost always. Here's an extreme example -- FOREVER
PEACE comprises 868 hand-written pages done at 66 different desks
-- and
campfires, cafés, and counters -- in twelve states and ten foreign countries.
pp. 1-2 - Shreveport, LA
3-8 - Oklahoma City
9-14 - Minneapolis
15-18 - Weatherford, OK
18-22 - Palo Duro Canyon, TX
22-24 - Portales, NM
24-26 - Roswell, NM
27-30 - Alamagordo, NM
30-33 - Silver City, NM
33-38 - Tucson
39-46 - Catalina St. Pk., AZ
46-50 - Sedona, AZ
50-54 - Flagstaff, AZ
54-55 - Gallup, NM
56-60 - Star Hill, NM
60-68 - Las Vegas, NM
68-70 - Carlsbad Caverns, NM
70-73 - Van Horn, TX
74-82 - Gainesville, FL
82-86 - Bucharest
86-91 - Timisoara
91-100 - Brasov
That's books one and two. Book Three has Gainesville, then
Sinaia
Bucharest
Lynbrook, NY
Frieburg, Germany
Gainesville
aboard the USSS Oceanic
ValenciaNassau
BarcelonaSan Jose CA
ParisE. Lansing, MI
Key West, FLAshburn, GA
GainesvilleAtlanta
Seattle, WAColumbus, GA
Gainesville
Cambridge, MA Book Four --
Winnipeg
CambridgeCambridge
Pensacola, FLLas Vegas
HonoluluBarcelona, Spain
Masella, Andorra
Canterbury, England
Dover
Rye
London
Glasgow
Book Five & Five Plus --
Gainesville
Ocala
USAF War College, Alabama
In Florida (on bicycle trip):
Palatka
O'Leno State Park
Wellborn
Suwannee R. State Park
Monticello
Chaires
Concord
Econfina River
(Lake Seminole, GA)
Chipley
Crestview
Milton
Q: What's your sign?
Stop.
Q: What did you look like as a soldier?
A: This --
Q: And two years later?
A: Like this, man ....
This was some advice to a young writer, discouraged because his
two novels
were getting nothing but rejections --
I've met hundreds of writers over the years, and a significant
fraction of
them, perhaps one fourth, had success right out of the gate.
But the majority
endured years of rejection before they made their first sales.
Some of that majority, no doubt, just had to practice their craft
until they were good enough to be published. Many of them were
perfectly good writers, though, who just had to wait until their
number came up. Publishing is a crapshoot. Stephen King wrote
three or four perfectly good novels before a publisher accepted
Carrie (and of course those novels were later published and became
best sellers). The Red Badge of Courage was rejected by almost
everyone; Crane was about to burn the manuscript and stick to
journalism,when a publisher grudgingly picked it up.
There is absolutely no correlation between early success and
literary value. There is a weak correlation between early success
and the probability of making a living from writing, but the
reasons for that are clear. Reinforcement, gratification.
I'm in the minority. I sold my first science fiction story; sold
my first novel to the first publisher who saw it; sold my first
play and my first movie. But my most successful novel, The Forever
War, was rejected by eighteen publishers before the nineteenth
picked it up.
You ask if a person can determine whether or not he has the talent
to make a living at writing. The easy answer is no, you yourself
can't determine it. But the question and answer are more complicated
than that. At one extreme, you can be a really bad writer and
make a living, so long as you can learn how to write a certain
kind of book (romances, nurse novels, etc.) and can tolerate
doing it day after day. At the other extreme, you can be the
best writer of your age, and nobody will acknowledge that until
you're dead and gone. (And while you write, you'll need a day
job or an understanding, employable, spouse.)
Fortunately, there are various intermediate states.
As to workshops like Iowa and Clarion, all you can finally say
is that they help some people and are disastrous for some. Most
great writers taught themselves, or wound up in a kind of salon
situation, regularly chewing the fat with other writers.
All I can do is counsel patience and optimism. When you get a
rejection, if it says something specific, do pay attention to
it -- but remember that editors are only human, and even the
best of them are more often wrong than right.
If you have any questions, not so frequently asked, drop me a
line at haldeman "at" mit.edu
