MK: One thing that comes through in almost all of your stories is that you love research, and that history is a treasure-trove of ideas for you. From the portable electric chair in “The Executioner’s Guild” to Jess Willard, heavyweight champion of the world in “The Pottawatomie Giant,” it’s obvious you love to find something bizarre that really happened, and then embroider at will. Would you like to tell us a little bit out how you research, and why? Why not just make things up completely out of whole cloth, instead of going to so much trouble in stories like “Liza and the Crazy Water Man”?
AD: I do entirely too much research, probably. Certainly from an economic standpoint, it doesn’t make much sense to research a story as thoroughly as if it were a novel. And sometimes the research elbows aside the writing; if I know too much about a given subject, I have to put it aside, perhaps never to return. More often, though, the research merely spurs the invention, gives me the courage to make things up. “Liza and the Crazy Water Man,” for example, has a lot of research in it, yes, but it’s still 95 percent made up. If you’re writing fiction, it has to be mostly invention, no matter how much research you do. On the other hand, if you’re writing about anybody other than yourself, you’ve got to do some research. OK, my protagonist is a bank teller. Have I ever been a bank teller? No. Well, then, I’d better find out what a bank teller’s job is like. I’d better read articles, read books, hang out in banks, talk to bank tellers, take notes. That’s research. In fact, even if you’re writing about yourself, you still need to do research. Ask anyone who’s written an autobiography, or a memoir of any sort. No one writes based on memory alone. The best research advice I can give fiction writers is this: write down only the stuff that really inspires you, that gives you an idea for a character, an incident, a line of dialogue, a bit of cool description—something you can run with. Because you’re not writing a research paper, you’re writing fiction, and the research must serve the fiction, not vice versa. Don’t write down the uninteresting stuff; you don’t need it.
MK: What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in becoming a professional writer? Telling someone you want to be a professional writer is like telling someone you want to be a professional artist—they just don’t get the instant respect they did in the Renaissance.
AD: Did professional artists get instant respect in the Renaissance? Theater people were regarded as little better than whores, and visual artists were at the mercy of their wealthy patrons, many of whom treated their “kept” artists with, at best, great condescension. The first professional writers, as we know the term, in the 19th century were furiously scribbling hacks, slaves to the marketplace, as dependent on the whims of the editors of, say, Godey’s Lady’s Book as Shakespeare was on the whims of the royal court, or as the TV networks are on the Nielsens. This is not to say you can’t get a lot of respect as a professional writer today. You can, if you’re writing legal briefs, or advertising copy, or how-to articles for home-repair magazines, or sitcoms.
But respect for writing fiction or poetry or drama, well, that just isn’t going to happen, because most people neither write nor read that stuff, and so they view it as irrelevant. There are many reasons to be a professional fiction writer, but if you want the respect of your family and your neighborhood, you’d best go into some other line of work, at least as a day job. I advise my students that they can be professional writers without ever earning a living at writing. Professionalism is in one’s attitude toward the writing, the craft, one’s fellow writers—not in how much money you make off it. So go be a professional insurance-company attorney (like Wallace Stevens) or trade-magazine editor (like Gene Wolfe) or farmer (like Wendell Berry) or psychotherapist (like Amy Bloom) or engineer (like Kurt Vonnegut), and be a professional writer on your own time, after you get home. So there’s no need, really, to want to be a professional writer; just declare yourself one, and proceed accordingly, whatever it is you happen to be doing for a living.
MK: Closely related to the previous question, how and why did you begin writing? No one becomes a writer of any success without a great deal of work and intent, so why do you write? There are old saws like Samuel Johnson’s dictum that only a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money, or the saying that if you can do anything but write, you should. So what do you get out of writing—what’s your motivation?
AD: For my first 15 years or so of life, my ambition was to be a cartoonist, specifically a comic-book creator. I churned out reams of comics, none of which I now have, alas. In hindsight I see this involved writing and much as drawing; art separate from story didn’t appeal. In junior high, I so disliked a 19th-century novel assigned by my English teacher, The Yemassee by William Gilmore Simms, that in study hall I amused myself by writing a parody of it, in installments, which I passed around to my classmates for the immediate gratification of hearing them guffaw. I had read all Woody Allen’s and S.J. Perelman’s and Robert Benchley’s collections by then, and was drunk on the parodic ideal. I think the title was “The Pekingese.” That’ll give you an idea of the level of my wit. I filled a notebook with the thing, and when my English teacher finally, inevitably, confiscated it, I expected savage punishment. Instead, she praised me and asked for a copy. This was my first indication that my fiction writing alone, without illustrations, might have merit. But everyone who knew me, with my full cooperation, soon channeled my writing/publishing impulse into journalism, because in journalism, as we all know, writers can Make a Living.
Fast forward to age 27, when for whatever reason my long-dormant fiction-writing impulse awoke with a vengeance, leading me to quit my perfectly good newspaper job and enroll in graduate school. I guess I was tired of writing other people’s stories, and wanted to try writing some of my own for a while. Fiction has been riding me ever since. Why do I write? Because I’m deeply unhappy when I’m not writing. That’s how I know I’m a writer. What do I get out of my writing? A momentary stay against confusion, a feeling of having ordered a small part of the world, to pleasant effect. That’s motivation enough, surely.
MK: What challenges do you see facing speculative fiction writers today? Let’s face it: writing weird stuff is harder to explain at a party, and it can be hard to make it in the field. What’s changed and what’s changing, in your opinion, about popular acceptance of spec-fic?
AD: Judging from TV commercials, which are aimed at the broadest possible cross-sections of America, even fairly sophisticated SF ideas have become commonplace, easily grasped by all. Last night, for example, I saw a commercial that showed an alternate 2001, in which the Roman Empire still rules the world. The emperor’s face is on a giant TV screen as he delivers his oration amid popping flash bulbs from the press corps. Then he drives off in a motorcade, waving at the crowds. That commercial would have been unimaginable even a few years ago, when the very idea of an “alternate history” had currency only among a few historians, and within the SF ghetto. There was a similar series of commercials recently that showed Larry Bird and Aretha Franklin and other celebrities working these dead-end, menial jobs, because this was the timeline in which they didn’t follow their talents, their dreams. That premise once would have just utterly confused anyone outside the fields of skiffy—I mean, you’d have had to explain yourself, in a movie, for 30 minutes, just to establish the rules of this alternate world. But now, in a mere 20 seconds, everyone gets it. That’s both really great for SF writers, and really bad for SF writers.
On one hand, Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon and Thomas Disch are being reprinted in these beautiful Vintage paperback editions, and Bruce Sterling and Kim Stanley Robinson are all over the place, very much pundits of the moment, and Jonathan Lethem and Jonathan Carroll are getting all sorts of mainstream publication and acclaim, and these formerly fringe SF ideas have considerably currency, and all that’s great. But on the other hand, the pressure to come up with something entirely new within sf, something that hasn’t been done on a TV commercial already, has become almost nightmarish. So many of the wildest future imaginings of even 10 years ago now look old hat. Some argue that SF has become mere nostalgia; we know the future is not going to look like those old Frank R. Paul illustrations from the pulps, so what good was sf, really, what good is SF now if it’s not keeping up, if it doesn’t keep showing us something new? So that’s the new challenge facing us, I think. The marketplace is not a new challenge, because SF is and has always been a tough dollar, and the suspicion with which a lot of folks view SF writing is not a new challenge, either, because let’s face it, all careers in America are viewed with suspicion if they aren’t lucrative. Oh, you want to be a proctologist, great, that makes sense, because proctologists make a lot of money. But if you want to be a forest ranger, or a potter, or a music teacher, or a farmer, or an SF writer, well, then, you must be crazy, right?