LBR: Which is more challenging for you, short fiction or novels?
JAG: I tend to write short fiction in a fever, when I get a good idea and have to splat it out as fast as possible. If I’m not in a fever, writing short stories is as painful as pulling teeth—I can still write them, but they feel forced. I’m likely to put them away half-finished, because there’s no point working on something mediocre. Short stories have to be screaming with life, or they’re just exercises in technique.
Novels also have to be screaming with life, but in my experience, the life always comes. I’ve spent at least a year on each of my books, and in the course of that year, there’s always time for something to wake up inside the work. Sometimes I’ve written the first twenty pages a dozen times, in a dozen tones of voice, picking different spots at which to pick up the action, different viewpoints, and so on. Eventually, I stumble across something that hits me with its chemistry and its prospects for going in interesting directions; then I know I can write a strong book.
LBR: I can relate to that. I’ve put a lot of short fiction of my own “away” on disc. The problem then becomes, when do you return to it and finish it, if at all?
JAG: Exactly. Once in a while I return to stories I’ve shelved, but it doesn’t happen very often. On the other hand, Expendable was essentially a shelved novel, and I did return to it eventually.
LBR: Something I’ve noticed about your style of writing is its visual descriptiveness, particularly that of characters and their appearance. Do you have an actively visual mind that demands such detail when writing, or is it an approach you’ve developed for the benefit of the reader?
JAG: I’d actually say I have an auditory mind—I hear all the scenes in my head, the characters speaking, the background sounds, and so on. I also hear the flow of the narrator’s words … and if I do visual descriptions well (thank you), it’s because I like vivid words. Of course, I do visualize the scenes, but I think it’s the choice of good words that brings the scenes alive.
The other thing that brings descriptions alive is the presence of a strong (and usually opinionated) viewpoint character. My characters don’t just look at a scene—they interact with the scene and respond to it emotionally.
Therefore it isn’t just a rainy day; it’s a day “when the drizzle started on my hair, soaked it good and flat, then began running down my cheeks, under my collar, and oozing through my bulky-knit sweater until the wool hung on my arms as heavy as a drenched sheep … but the damp wasn’t content to quit there, and every step I took, I could feel the rain seeping insistently through my underwear. A twenty-mile walk in this was really going to chafe.” Now I think that’s a good descriptive passage, but you’ll notice there are no visuals at all. It’s purely tactile, with the added auditory pleasure of words like “oozing” and “chafe.” What really makes the passage come alive is the clear presence of a narrator experiencing all the dribbling wetness, and responding appropriately. If readers can “see” this scene, it’s because they automatically put themselves in the narrator’s place and fill in a bunch of details from their own imaginations.
LBR: Silly me. I referred to it as “visual writing,” when in fact it’s sensory writing.
JAG: Yes, it’s sensory writing, but even more, it’s character-centered. I’m not just describing the rain, I’m telling the story of a character’s encounter with the rain. The story takes place over time (as the effects of the rain get worse) and it indicates the character’s reactions to the rain as well as the mere sensations.
When I was a student at Clarion West in 1989, Lucius Shepard suggested we should all make a conscious effort to notice the order in which we observed details whenever we entered a room. For example, did we notice noises first or visuals? How did our eyes track around the room, taking things in? Did we fix our attention on something within the first second, or did we keep looking around? By paying attention to the way we actually experienced a room, we could do a better job of reproducing a character’s experiences for a reader.
LBR: Given your rather descriptive sensibilities, have you an interest in other forms of writing such as screenplays, teleplays, or comic books? Have these forms been an influence over your work?
JAG: I started reading comics when I was five, and I still read them now. I’ve never tried to write one, but I’ve certainly considered it from time to time. I keep thinking I should send letters to Marvel and DC, telling them I’m available….
LBR: Now that would be an interesting fit. What characters would you be interested in pursuing?
JAG: I haven’t really thought about specific characters. I love practically anything that Alan Moore writes, but I know better than to think I could take on, say, Top 10 and do as good a job.
Either I’d do something new of my own, or else I’d take on a character who’s currently unused and see what I could do. The first two unused characters who come to mind are the Atom (DC) and Shang Chi (Marvel), but I don’t have any ideas for them off the cuff. They’re just characters who might be interesting to play around with.
As for other media, I’ve written a number of plays and radio dramas, not to mention a fair number of songs. For a long time, I didn’t write stories at all … and I usually performed the stuff that I wrote. I did a number of coffee houses during university, singing and playing piano, and also wrote for various theatrical groups on campus.
Later on, I did a good deal of improv theatre, which I think had a big influence on my writing. With anything I write, the first draft is basically a series of improv scenes building on one another. Then I go back and rewrite to clean up the messy bits. I’ve never done anything significant with screenplays. Yes, I’ve goofed around with movie and TV ideas, but never seriously. Maybe someday….
LBR: When you created the Explorer Corps for your novels, one of the prerequisites for the organization was that Explorers have to have a physical or mental abnormality that makes them social outcasts. Hence, many of your characters (if not all) sport characteristics that make them less than the “model” appearance of the prototypical adventure protagonist. Why did you embark in this particular direction?
JAG: I’ve talked about my background in improv. Back then, I used to improvise monologues at the typewriter (yes, this was back in the days of typewriters); I’d take on a voice and just go with it, with no plan at all about what might come out.
In 1976, I began writing for a musical-comedy revue group at the University of Waterloo. That year we did a Star Trek parody, and the show had a character called the Expendable Crew Member. The ECM was, of course, the poor schmuck who accompanied the regular cast into dangerous situations and always got slaughtered. In the show, the ECM was a running gag: he’d walk on stage, get killed in some colorful way, and then the play would continue.
Some time after that, I was improvising at the typewriter and began to write in the voice of the ECM. In the show, the ECM had been a man; but for some reason, when I was improvising, it became the voice of a woman who identified herself as Festina Ramos. She just began ranting, “Oh, so you think being an ECM is funny? Well let me tell you exactly why we’re considered expendable.”
And the first 100 pages of Expendable ripped out like that in just a few days. It was entirely unplanned. I don’t believe in “channeling” characters or any such mumbo-jumbo; Festina was just something in my own subconscious that came barreling out for reasons I’ll never understand. I didn’t question what I was writing—I just wrote.
Basically, that initial head-rush lasted right up to the point where the Explorers landed on Melaquin, the “planet of no return.” Then the momentum stopped, and I had no idea what happened next. I made a few feeble attempts to continue now and then, but never anything that worked. It was only fifteen years later that I said, “This is ridiculous, I’ve got to finish the damned thing,” and I finally got the story going again.
LBR: Obviously Festina Ramos is one of your favorite characters, as she has appeared in three of your novels. How did you come to develop the character?
JAG: Festina developed herself (or more accurately, she emerged on her own from my subconscious). Later on, my editor at Eos (Jennifer Brehl) wanted me to write more Festina stories, so I hit on the approach that I’ve taken in subsequent books.