David F. Daumit
David F. Daumit is a partner in Discount Rocket Productions, where he produces independent films. His writing has been published in professional and collegiate literary journals, and he has self-published several anthologies featuring his own and other people’s work.
~*~
Your story, ‘’Chasm,’’ seems to have a spiritual element running through it. Could I be correct?
I do think there is a spiritual element to “Chasm.” One character believes he experiences a divine revelation, while another cannot come to terms with that because it goes against her own religious beliefs. All of the characters act for better or worse based on their faith or lack thereof. While I never intended for the story to preach or impose a moral perspective, I think it shows what can happen when otherwise intelligent people act in a way that I would call spiritually amateurish. Their belief systems preclude them from being open to the wider world and understanding how their actions affect those around them.
Any particular inspiration behind the story?
The one element in the story that has a definite inspiration behind it is the thing in the pit. From a very young age, I have been fascinated by colossal animals and monsters, especially whales as they are depicted in fiction. Three images in particular influenced me when I came up with the thing in the pit: Monstro from Disney's Pinocchio, Moby Dick from the John Huston film, and the cover art to an old science fiction novel, Cachalot, by Alan Dean Foster. The thought of coming face to face with something that immensely huge awes me, and I wanted to impart that feeling of awe to the reader. When I began describing the thing as experienced in proximity by one of the characters, I exaggerated the size of it an order of magnitude or more over a whale to really drive that feeling home.
As a filmmaker, has the thought ever crossed your mind to adapt one of your own stories for film? I think ‘’Chasm’’ would make a great short film.
The thought almost always crosses my mind to adapt a story I'm writing into a screenplay. I have tried to do that once or twice, without much success. I find pacing in screenwriting much more difficult than pacing in prose, but I keep working on it and hope to one day successfully adapt some of my stories into scripts.
Are you more of screenwriter or fiction writer?
I'm definitely more of a prose writer than a script writer. So far, I have only written a few screenplays, compared to dozens of prose stories. I do want to write more scripts, and I have learned a lot about doing that from friends in the movie industry and my film making partners. Now it just comes down to putting in the many, many hours of practice to slowly hone that skill.
Don’t both of these writing styles have a lot in common?
When I write prose, I feel that I am free to use any style and format that I want. But when I write a script, I need to follow an industry-standard format that I feel shapes my writing and forces me to craft things a certain way. My overall story may be the same when I write in either medium, but the style of how I tell it in one or the other ends up being very different.
You are very adept at characterization. Do you feel that strong characters and believable dialogue are essential to a story or film’s success?
If I judge success in terms of a story or film being good, than I absolutely feel that strong characters and believable dialogue are essential to it. But if I judge success in terms of popularity and profitability, then I don't feel those things matter all that much. I would like to feel that they do, but I read/see far too many stories/films that succeed without having those elements in them.
Has the thought of publishing a collection of your own short fiction ever come to mind? Based on your story ‘’Chasm,’’ I’d say it would be a raging success.
For a few years beginning in the late 90's, I self-published several literary journals. I would like to think they were successful based on my previous criteria of being quality works, but unfortunately they weren't successful as far as profitability goes. Still, I'm very fond of those books, and it was great experience compiling, designing, and editing them.
Any new stories or films in the works?
On my own, I'm usually writing something—part of a story, an outline for a script, or even just a fragment of dialog. It's not often that I actually flesh out whatever tidbit I'm working on into complete piece, though. With Discount Rocket, I do have a few projects in the works: We've just finished a short documentary, we're about to re-edit a short film that I wrote, and we're starting on another short documentary. So hopefully 2011 will be a full and exciting year for us.
I hope so as well. Good luck!
~*~
Your story, ‘’Chasm,’’ seems to have a spiritual element running through it. Could I be correct?
I do think there is a spiritual element to “Chasm.” One character believes he experiences a divine revelation, while another cannot come to terms with that because it goes against her own religious beliefs. All of the characters act for better or worse based on their faith or lack thereof. While I never intended for the story to preach or impose a moral perspective, I think it shows what can happen when otherwise intelligent people act in a way that I would call spiritually amateurish. Their belief systems preclude them from being open to the wider world and understanding how their actions affect those around them.
Any particular inspiration behind the story?
The one element in the story that has a definite inspiration behind it is the thing in the pit. From a very young age, I have been fascinated by colossal animals and monsters, especially whales as they are depicted in fiction. Three images in particular influenced me when I came up with the thing in the pit: Monstro from Disney's Pinocchio, Moby Dick from the John Huston film, and the cover art to an old science fiction novel, Cachalot, by Alan Dean Foster. The thought of coming face to face with something that immensely huge awes me, and I wanted to impart that feeling of awe to the reader. When I began describing the thing as experienced in proximity by one of the characters, I exaggerated the size of it an order of magnitude or more over a whale to really drive that feeling home.
As a filmmaker, has the thought ever crossed your mind to adapt one of your own stories for film? I think ‘’Chasm’’ would make a great short film.
The thought almost always crosses my mind to adapt a story I'm writing into a screenplay. I have tried to do that once or twice, without much success. I find pacing in screenwriting much more difficult than pacing in prose, but I keep working on it and hope to one day successfully adapt some of my stories into scripts.
Are you more of screenwriter or fiction writer?
I'm definitely more of a prose writer than a script writer. So far, I have only written a few screenplays, compared to dozens of prose stories. I do want to write more scripts, and I have learned a lot about doing that from friends in the movie industry and my film making partners. Now it just comes down to putting in the many, many hours of practice to slowly hone that skill.
Don’t both of these writing styles have a lot in common?
When I write prose, I feel that I am free to use any style and format that I want. But when I write a script, I need to follow an industry-standard format that I feel shapes my writing and forces me to craft things a certain way. My overall story may be the same when I write in either medium, but the style of how I tell it in one or the other ends up being very different.
You are very adept at characterization. Do you feel that strong characters and believable dialogue are essential to a story or film’s success?
If I judge success in terms of a story or film being good, than I absolutely feel that strong characters and believable dialogue are essential to it. But if I judge success in terms of popularity and profitability, then I don't feel those things matter all that much. I would like to feel that they do, but I read/see far too many stories/films that succeed without having those elements in them.
Has the thought of publishing a collection of your own short fiction ever come to mind? Based on your story ‘’Chasm,’’ I’d say it would be a raging success.
For a few years beginning in the late 90's, I self-published several literary journals. I would like to think they were successful based on my previous criteria of being quality works, but unfortunately they weren't successful as far as profitability goes. Still, I'm very fond of those books, and it was great experience compiling, designing, and editing them.
Any new stories or films in the works?
On my own, I'm usually writing something—part of a story, an outline for a script, or even just a fragment of dialog. It's not often that I actually flesh out whatever tidbit I'm working on into complete piece, though. With Discount Rocket, I do have a few projects in the works: We've just finished a short documentary, we're about to re-edit a short film that I wrote, and we're starting on another short documentary. So hopefully 2011 will be a full and exciting year for us.
I hope so as well. Good luck!
Mark Joseph Kiewlak
Mark Joseph Kiewlak has been a published author for more than twenty years. Currently, his work can be found in The Bitter Oleander, Bewildering Stories, A Twist of Noir, All Due Respect, Plots With Guns, and many others. His story, "The Present," was nominated for the 2010 Spinetingler Award: Best Short Story on the Web. He has also written for DC Comics.
~*~
Although I really enjoyed your story ‘’A Terrible Beauty is Scorned,’’ I must admit I had some difficulty placing it in any certain genre. Was it intended as a horror–themed tale?
It seems the nature of my stories to fall between genres. If there is ever a conscious effort made by people out in the world to categorize my work, I can rest assured that I will have done everything in my power to subvert it. Even my hard-boiled/noir tales can hardly be called mysteries, although that is the umbrella classification under which they fall in that genre.
I’m a big fan of mystique (no, not the X-men character—well, her too). I subscribe to glimpses, half-heard voices, half-defined somethings. Explaining too much is limiting and intrusive upon the reader’s imagination. It compromises the level of their participation. The best stories are the ones where the author is figuring out what’s going to happen right alongside the reader. Those are the ones that make you feel truly a part of the journey. Ray Bradbury—whose work I adore—defines this principle. He never tells you what the hell exactly is going on in his stories, but he leaves you eager always to find out. I never bothered to think about who Mistress D is, or how she came to be, because what does it matter? Any further definitions beyond her actions in the story are extraneous and irrelevant. She is who the story needs her to be. If I find certain facets of her character fascinating enough, they may appear next time out in another creation. That’s the fun of imagination. It’s unlimited. Or it damn well oughta be.
What – or who – was the primary inspiration for the tale?
I was reading my way through Alan Moore’s run on DC Comics’ SWAMP THING and his poetic prose was wearing me down every night, filling me up with storytelling desires of my own, until finally I crawled on over to the desk to see what I could come up with, just matching his voice to my own, dropping a guy in a very familiar guy-situation (the masturbating part—not the encounter with Mistress D) and then ramping up the nihilism to its most costly extreme.
I was also reading Anne Rice’s earlier work at the time, so that probably accounts for the unapologetically erotic nature of most every passage. “Terrible Beauty” became a forerunner, in that regard, to much of what I have had published these past few years in Clean Sheets—all-out erotic tales featuring super-heroes, science fiction themes, or in some cases very straightforward literary backdrops—where the characters just happen to be having sex.
When was your so-called ‘’defining moment,’’ when you decided you wanted to get into writing fiction?
I began too early to ever have one.
I still have one of my earliest works—an “epic saga” that ran 70 pages or so, written in no. 2 pencil in my trusty Snoopy notebook. I reworked the story the very next year, when I was eight years old, bigger and better than before.
Even before the written word took hold of me, the backyard itself had been my theatre. I was saving the world on a daily basis—sometimes from my posh penthouse fifty stories above the street, sometimes from the bridge of my starship, always under fire. Comic books and Star Trek fueled many of my efforts (and still do). My older brother’s comic book collection began unbroken from 1961 (the dawn of the Marvel Era) -- enough imagination-fuel right there for a lifetime. By the time I became an English major, however, I was well on my way to sabotaging whatever inborn creativity had carried me along to that point in life. I unfortunately lost a decade or so to the notion that I needed to “learn” to be a writer, studying how-to books, manuscript guidelines, market books—all the while never truly believing that I already had everything I needed inside of me. Poisoned by intention, few works survive from this period—those that have, only serving to prove that I was already publishable (by today’s standards, whatever they are) way back then, and didn’t know it. I took a run at DC Comics in the ‘90s, and went from zero credits in the field to having my first story appear after just two years of effort. My very first response to my very first script was a call from the editor, who told me it was good enough for publication, but they had nowhere to place it, so hang in there. I’d still be scripting for DC today if they hadn’t instituted their “no unsolicited submissions” policy—and if every single editor whom my work had impressed hadn’t quit!
I noticed your work has been published in A Twist of Noir magazine too. What genre preference – if any in particular –is your primary focus as a writer?
After my success at DC I came back to short fiction and finally started listening to the narrator in my head, jotting down on most occasions a single sentence at a time, and then saying, “That’s it, I quit”—only to have the next sentence appear in my brain the moment I stood up from my desk. I adopted this constant process of “letting go” as my natural state—and it has remained as such ever since. This was about ten years ago, when genre preference finally became an issue for me, because I was writing one or more stories everyday, and I started thinking what the hell was I going to do with them? The dozen or more hard-boiled pieces that have appeared in A Twist Of Noir are all of this era, as are the half dozen horror stories that appeared in Black Petals, and the myriad tales of magical realism I’ve placed in magazines like The Bitter Oleander, Wild Violet, and Bewildering Stories. Getting published is definitely a separate “career” from the writing itself, and, for someone like me—who prefers working on the oldest possible computer with the oldest possible word processing program—about a million times more frustrating. I don’t think about genre until after the story is done, and usually then I can’t figure out what genre it is! Fortunately, the editors who have published my stuff don’t seem too concerned with genre labels—so long as the stories are well told.
I’ve spent the last year or so writing several “epic sagas” of space opera and childhood adventure that will never be read by the public. Turning in a chapter a day on these “saving the world” indulgences keeps my mind free for the creation of those other genre-evading hybrids that seem my forte. With the audience unplugged I can become the hero I used to be in my backyard—a Bruce Wayne/Tony Stark/James Bond lover/fighter—and never once worry about feeling ridiculous.
Who were your biggest influences as a writer of horror? Of noir?
Alan Moore, Anne Rice, Clive Barker, Stephen King (when I was younger), Poe, Kafka, most of the classics like Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There’s plenty to learn from in works that have survived for hundreds of years. T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Coleridge—their works are damn scary, apocalyptic in the extreme, yet so personal, making the reader fear for the fate of all Mankind by first pointing out the fear within ourselves. I’ve never come across anything more terrifying than my own imagination, let loose in the middle of the night.
In the noir/hard-boiled/P.I./mystery/suspense category, there is only Robert B. Parker. When I found his style, in 1985, I found my own. The power of his storytelling embodies everything that I myself wish to accomplish on the page. His death last year hit me hard, impelling me to step up my own efforts in continuing the tradition of detective fiction that he himself carried over from Raymond Chandler and the earliest pulps. I wrote a letter of condolence (which I’ve never sent) to his widow, Joan, struggling in it to define how much richer my own life has become, thanks to the example set by Spenser and his other protagonists. I would not care to imagine my life without the comfort of the world he defined through his creations; it is simply the world in which I would most like to live.
Can we expect any new novels or short fiction collections coming soon?
I will have one novel and one collection ready to go by the end of 2011. When Lovely Things Are Lost gathers up all 35 appearances of The Man With No Name from the past five years, featured in more than a dozen magazines, beginning with the Sin Cityesque “PillowTalk” (Hardboiled # 35, Spring 2006) and ongoing still. The character has since graduated to his first novel—which I wrote last fall—and been given a name (which he’s asked me not to reveal here).
I’ve got a few other works put together, but I go through such a meticulous process of examination before I send my words out into the world, that it will take some time (years, probably) before I let go of these creations so recently manifest. An agent would help a lot, but I have yet to undertake the process of fitting my work to the right one.
I think that when I’m honest with myself I can clearly differentiate between the goals I “hope” to accomplish and those I know with certainty I will achieve. I remember very distinctly, when I began in earnest trying to break in at DC Comics, how I poured my heart into every sample script I wrote, without having any idea as to how they would be received or by whom. It simply didn’t matter because I never imagined the possibility of not succeeding. If I can imagine failure in any endeavor I try to move on to one where I can’t imagine it. I try to do the things that will thrill and enthrall me and to forget, really, about accomplishing anything. That is when all my true accomplishments occur.
I still sit entranced everyday by the notion that I can pick up a pencil or pen and, just by putting words on a blank piece of paper, make worlds come alive. I think I recognized even in childhood that my own imagination held all the entertainment I would ever need.
Mark, thank you very much.
~*~
Although I really enjoyed your story ‘’A Terrible Beauty is Scorned,’’ I must admit I had some difficulty placing it in any certain genre. Was it intended as a horror–themed tale?
It seems the nature of my stories to fall between genres. If there is ever a conscious effort made by people out in the world to categorize my work, I can rest assured that I will have done everything in my power to subvert it. Even my hard-boiled/noir tales can hardly be called mysteries, although that is the umbrella classification under which they fall in that genre.
I’m a big fan of mystique (no, not the X-men character—well, her too). I subscribe to glimpses, half-heard voices, half-defined somethings. Explaining too much is limiting and intrusive upon the reader’s imagination. It compromises the level of their participation. The best stories are the ones where the author is figuring out what’s going to happen right alongside the reader. Those are the ones that make you feel truly a part of the journey. Ray Bradbury—whose work I adore—defines this principle. He never tells you what the hell exactly is going on in his stories, but he leaves you eager always to find out. I never bothered to think about who Mistress D is, or how she came to be, because what does it matter? Any further definitions beyond her actions in the story are extraneous and irrelevant. She is who the story needs her to be. If I find certain facets of her character fascinating enough, they may appear next time out in another creation. That’s the fun of imagination. It’s unlimited. Or it damn well oughta be.
What – or who – was the primary inspiration for the tale?
I was reading my way through Alan Moore’s run on DC Comics’ SWAMP THING and his poetic prose was wearing me down every night, filling me up with storytelling desires of my own, until finally I crawled on over to the desk to see what I could come up with, just matching his voice to my own, dropping a guy in a very familiar guy-situation (the masturbating part—not the encounter with Mistress D) and then ramping up the nihilism to its most costly extreme.
I was also reading Anne Rice’s earlier work at the time, so that probably accounts for the unapologetically erotic nature of most every passage. “Terrible Beauty” became a forerunner, in that regard, to much of what I have had published these past few years in Clean Sheets—all-out erotic tales featuring super-heroes, science fiction themes, or in some cases very straightforward literary backdrops—where the characters just happen to be having sex.
When was your so-called ‘’defining moment,’’ when you decided you wanted to get into writing fiction?
I began too early to ever have one.
I still have one of my earliest works—an “epic saga” that ran 70 pages or so, written in no. 2 pencil in my trusty Snoopy notebook. I reworked the story the very next year, when I was eight years old, bigger and better than before.
Even before the written word took hold of me, the backyard itself had been my theatre. I was saving the world on a daily basis—sometimes from my posh penthouse fifty stories above the street, sometimes from the bridge of my starship, always under fire. Comic books and Star Trek fueled many of my efforts (and still do). My older brother’s comic book collection began unbroken from 1961 (the dawn of the Marvel Era) -- enough imagination-fuel right there for a lifetime. By the time I became an English major, however, I was well on my way to sabotaging whatever inborn creativity had carried me along to that point in life. I unfortunately lost a decade or so to the notion that I needed to “learn” to be a writer, studying how-to books, manuscript guidelines, market books—all the while never truly believing that I already had everything I needed inside of me. Poisoned by intention, few works survive from this period—those that have, only serving to prove that I was already publishable (by today’s standards, whatever they are) way back then, and didn’t know it. I took a run at DC Comics in the ‘90s, and went from zero credits in the field to having my first story appear after just two years of effort. My very first response to my very first script was a call from the editor, who told me it was good enough for publication, but they had nowhere to place it, so hang in there. I’d still be scripting for DC today if they hadn’t instituted their “no unsolicited submissions” policy—and if every single editor whom my work had impressed hadn’t quit!
I noticed your work has been published in A Twist of Noir magazine too. What genre preference – if any in particular –is your primary focus as a writer?
After my success at DC I came back to short fiction and finally started listening to the narrator in my head, jotting down on most occasions a single sentence at a time, and then saying, “That’s it, I quit”—only to have the next sentence appear in my brain the moment I stood up from my desk. I adopted this constant process of “letting go” as my natural state—and it has remained as such ever since. This was about ten years ago, when genre preference finally became an issue for me, because I was writing one or more stories everyday, and I started thinking what the hell was I going to do with them? The dozen or more hard-boiled pieces that have appeared in A Twist Of Noir are all of this era, as are the half dozen horror stories that appeared in Black Petals, and the myriad tales of magical realism I’ve placed in magazines like The Bitter Oleander, Wild Violet, and Bewildering Stories. Getting published is definitely a separate “career” from the writing itself, and, for someone like me—who prefers working on the oldest possible computer with the oldest possible word processing program—about a million times more frustrating. I don’t think about genre until after the story is done, and usually then I can’t figure out what genre it is! Fortunately, the editors who have published my stuff don’t seem too concerned with genre labels—so long as the stories are well told.
I’ve spent the last year or so writing several “epic sagas” of space opera and childhood adventure that will never be read by the public. Turning in a chapter a day on these “saving the world” indulgences keeps my mind free for the creation of those other genre-evading hybrids that seem my forte. With the audience unplugged I can become the hero I used to be in my backyard—a Bruce Wayne/Tony Stark/James Bond lover/fighter—and never once worry about feeling ridiculous.
Who were your biggest influences as a writer of horror? Of noir?
Alan Moore, Anne Rice, Clive Barker, Stephen King (when I was younger), Poe, Kafka, most of the classics like Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There’s plenty to learn from in works that have survived for hundreds of years. T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Coleridge—their works are damn scary, apocalyptic in the extreme, yet so personal, making the reader fear for the fate of all Mankind by first pointing out the fear within ourselves. I’ve never come across anything more terrifying than my own imagination, let loose in the middle of the night.
In the noir/hard-boiled/P.I./mystery/suspense category, there is only Robert B. Parker. When I found his style, in 1985, I found my own. The power of his storytelling embodies everything that I myself wish to accomplish on the page. His death last year hit me hard, impelling me to step up my own efforts in continuing the tradition of detective fiction that he himself carried over from Raymond Chandler and the earliest pulps. I wrote a letter of condolence (which I’ve never sent) to his widow, Joan, struggling in it to define how much richer my own life has become, thanks to the example set by Spenser and his other protagonists. I would not care to imagine my life without the comfort of the world he defined through his creations; it is simply the world in which I would most like to live.
Can we expect any new novels or short fiction collections coming soon?
I will have one novel and one collection ready to go by the end of 2011. When Lovely Things Are Lost gathers up all 35 appearances of The Man With No Name from the past five years, featured in more than a dozen magazines, beginning with the Sin Cityesque “PillowTalk” (Hardboiled # 35, Spring 2006) and ongoing still. The character has since graduated to his first novel—which I wrote last fall—and been given a name (which he’s asked me not to reveal here).
I’ve got a few other works put together, but I go through such a meticulous process of examination before I send my words out into the world, that it will take some time (years, probably) before I let go of these creations so recently manifest. An agent would help a lot, but I have yet to undertake the process of fitting my work to the right one.
I think that when I’m honest with myself I can clearly differentiate between the goals I “hope” to accomplish and those I know with certainty I will achieve. I remember very distinctly, when I began in earnest trying to break in at DC Comics, how I poured my heart into every sample script I wrote, without having any idea as to how they would be received or by whom. It simply didn’t matter because I never imagined the possibility of not succeeding. If I can imagine failure in any endeavor I try to move on to one where I can’t imagine it. I try to do the things that will thrill and enthrall me and to forget, really, about accomplishing anything. That is when all my true accomplishments occur.
I still sit entranced everyday by the notion that I can pick up a pencil or pen and, just by putting words on a blank piece of paper, make worlds come alive. I think I recognized even in childhood that my own imagination held all the entertainment I would ever need.
Mark, thank you very much.
Nicholas Seeley
I started writing sci-fi when I was 14 or so, but took a long hiatus between 20 and 30. Studied theater at school, and did some acting, directing and writing plays after that. Then I studied journalism and moved to the Middle East, to find work in one of the magazines that had opened up here. Did that for five years, and kept writing, a bit. The Strange Horizonsstory is the only one I've had published in a major market. (I haven't been doing a lot of submitting, until the last few months.)
In November, I quit the magazine job to finish work on a novel that I've had brewing since I worked in Cambodia in 2003. It's not spec-fic, but a thriller, though it concerns many of the same themes I look at in my writing.
I'm really interested in Arabic science fiction -- or perhaps the lack of science fiction, in what was once one of the world's great creative cultures. I like writing about Arab characters and locales, and trying to create fiction that has a sense of the scope of the world that goes beyond America. I'm really interested in media, and how media technology is changing our minds and bodies; that's another theme. The fallibility of memory, even reality. People displaced in time and space, trying to get back to a world they (almost) remember -- yes, lost souls.
~*~
You told me you started writing fiction at the age of 14. Why the long hiatus between the ages of 20 and 30?
I grew up reading all sorts of fantastic literature--Beowulf to Benford. And as a kid my life revolved around books, so I started writing fairly early. I was drawn to sci-fi and fantasy because I felt that both, in different ways, offered the same opportunity: to suggest that the universe might not work at all the way we think it does. Reality can outpace our perception, or our philosophy.
I was sending out stories to magazines all through junior high and high school—crazy pieces about angels and alternate universes. I didn't have much success with them, and looking back I think that, while I had all sorts of cool science fiction-y ideas then, the problem was I didn't know much about actual people. But in college something happened: I was studying theater, and really fell in love with dramatic writing. I was excited by the idea of how a very simple piece of dialogue can contain these huge, almost limitless possibilities for human interaction. So, working in a new medium really got me thinking about how people talk, how they behave: how we approach every situation with this huge catalogue of personal needs, and we scheme and strategize to get what we want. In drama, where you have no omniscient description and limited visual cues, human desire is really the only tool you have to make a story interesting.
My first play was science fiction, it was about an American terrorist in a futuristic prison. It won a regional theater award, and that really confirmed to me that I needed to explore this avenue more. So I spent the next few years writing plays almost exclusively (and occasionally directing and producing them as well).
I came back to short stories for a lot of reasons. For one, it's a bit hard to pursue theater in a foreign country, where the native language isn't English! I ran an English-language drama group in Amman for a while, working with a journalist-writer-actor named Jibril Hambel, but it became too much work to maintain. Also, though, there's a certain class of ideas I get that really lend themselves to the short story format. For example, stories where a key element is an alien or futuristic environment, it can be hard to depict that with just dialogue! I was starting to miss the scope that was possible with print, where all you need to make something real is the reader's imagination.
I haven't given up on trying to bring together spec-fic and live theater, though. It's not done so often, and there are reasons for that—like I said, it can be very challenging to put sci-fi or even fantasy ideas into a dramatic setting. But it's worth trying. I still think there's something very particular to live theater, a kind of connection with the audience that no other medium provides, and that offers great possibilities for speculative genres as well as realistic ones.
Why the move to the middle east? Weren’t you concerned with your own safety?
I was working in New York on September 11, 2001—a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center. I was in my office when the attacks happened, trying to find out what was going on, trying to get out as the sky went black. It was terrifying, and tragic and surreal, and I guess that for me—like for a lot of other people—it was a wake up call. When you're standing on the edge of a calamity like that, you to look at the part you're playing in society and ask: is it enough? I had friends talking about joining the army, or running for political office ... I decided I was going to be a journalist, because I figured that was something that I could do well, and make at least a little bit of difference to the world.
The Middle East was a natural place for me to want to be—and it helped that in 2004, there was a media boom going on in Jordan, so there were jobs. At first I was hoping to go to Iraq—I guess every novice journalist wants to go to war; our society makes it seem so meaningful! But working in Amman, I found I was really interested in a different kind of story; the kind that tries to look in depth at some social or economic issue, explain the factors surrounding it and tell the stories of the individuals caught up by these powerful forces.
On that front, there was a lot of interesting stuff going on in Jordan, so I stayed here. And Jordan is really not dangerous. It has a strong internal security apparatus, and terrorism or political violence just aren't significant threats. Some people can be a bit hostile toward Americans, and will lecture you about politics, but even that's quite rare. Street crime is present, but at much, much lower levels than almost anywhere in the States. I found Syria and Yemen very similar—there was some genuine risks there, places one should not go, etc., but the majority of society was extremely welcoming. The Middle East, by and large, is just not as rough and scary as Americans want it to be.
Or, at least, that's how it's been for most of the time I've been here. These new uprisings, and the crackdowns against them, are worrisome. Any place can be dangerous when the state starts losing its monopoly on power. The Arab Spring is changing the whole landscape, and that could have serious regional repercussions. Iran doesn't want to lose its proxies and allies in the region, like Syria. Neither does Saudi. States are playing on Sunni-Shia sectarian tension to try and suppress the revolts, but that could get out of hand. The whole regional situation could go pear-shaped very quickly. So, these days I worry about security, yes—but that's quite a new thing.
I’ve heard you use the term ‘’Arabic Scifi.’’ What exactly is the difference between Arabic Scifi and American Scifi?
The difference is that American sciifi exists; Arabic sci-fi is still a dream in the minds of a few young people. There is science fiction written in Arabic, but the amount is tiny, and it has very little circulation or recognition. Many people here don't even know it exists; to a lot of Arabs, "Arabic science fiction" feels like a contradiction in terms.
When I talk to Arabic publishers and writers about why there's essentially no sci-fi here, the reasons they give are usually cultural: Arabs are focused on the past, not on the future. It's certainly true that imagined histories often hold pride of place here—it's the glory of Ummayad Baghdad, or the noble Bedouin fighters of some ancient tribal desert, or the sort of lush, agrarian dream of Palestine-that-was, before "the catastrophe" of 1948. To some degree, you can see the past as crowding out the future.
But I think there are other reasons that are just as important, if not more. Some are rooted in the educational system—as one publisher said to me: how can we have science fiction when there's no science in our schools? Others lie in the publishing industry, which is ineffective and balkanized. Its collapse has contributed to a general decline in Arabic literary production, and what we would call genre fiction has probably suffered the most.
Arabic literature, like Western literature, has its traditions of fantastic and speculative fiction. There are antecedents, ancient Arab scientists writing about rockets to the moon and so forth. But in a society where reading in general is in decline, where science education is mostly terrible and where the future can look pretty bleak, creating a literature based on speculative thinking can seem pretty distant.
Was your story ‘’Hole In the Floor’’ inspired by the Arabic style of writing?
In a word: no. I speak some Arabic, but I don't read or write it. (Written and spoken Arabic might as well be different languages, which is another massive problem for Arab educational systems!)
I wouldn't say it's inspired by any particular element of Arab culture, but by thinking about some of the differences between Arab and American culture. Our rituals, our ways of coping with and explaining the world, are so divergent—sometimes I think people actually underestimate how much people from different cultures don't understand about each other, or don't connect. There's this cliché belief that "we're all the same underneath," which is kinda true on a sort of animal, reptile-bain level, but totally false once you're on a cultural level, of behavior.
Our responses and feelings may be very different, but so much of the stuff we experience really is quite universal, and human. So I wanted to look at someone who was between, who was unsure of where he lived, culturally, but who was going through a powerful emotional experience—in this case, grief and terror—and see where it took him.
Would you consider that story more Scifi or fantasy? Neither one?
I don't know if it's traditional fantasy—some parts of it come close to traditional horror—but I think it fits into a broader stream of fantastic fiction. Small-F fantasy has always been part of the literary landscape, and lots of writers explore it who wouldn't be called genre writers: Hesse, Borges and Marquez, central European surrealists like Hrabal and Szerb, Murakami, even the ancient Greek tragedians. Lots of my favorite writers inhabit that region.
That stream also exists in popular culture. A media of the fantastic reflects the first kind of pop culture we ever had: folk tales and campfire stories, and legends of spirits out in the woods.
Now, I look at what's being published today and see a lot of the barriers around "fantasy," in particular, breaking down. Whether you're talking about steampunk or fang 'n' fur romance, it feels like more and more people are getting turned on to literature that uses otherworldly events as part of its vocabulary—even if it doesn't fit into a certain genre with a certain kind of Michael Whelan picture on the cover. Not necessarily "fantasy," but fiction of the fantastic.
This is going on across multiple genres and platforms, too—Duncan Jones is getting art film buffs interested in space again with Moon, kids are learning to read with Harry and the wizards. Musicians like Gorillaz are putting out hit albums that are basically science fiction stories. I think the appeal of traditional sci-fi and fantasy is getting broader, and as it does, more and more stuff is popping up that doesn't fit those traditional definitions, that feels a little different, and that leads to new genres as people try to categorize it.
Writing a story like "The Hole in the Floor," I might be thinking about the wendigo stories I heard as a kid. But I also might be looking back to Kafka, and the techno-fables of Stanislaw Lem … and Poe and Lovecraft ... and Stephen Dobyns' poetry ... and both versions of Iain Banks … It's genre fiction, that's for sure—but it's not a genre.
What genre do you prefer to write in? Are you a versatile writer?
I hope I'm a versatile writer. I guess I'm finding that out. I try not to think about "genre" too much when I'm writing. After all, if you approach your next work as a "sword and sorcery epic," or a "hard-sf space opera," all you're likely to do is write a parody. I try to let a story set its own agenda.
I love to read very genre-d fiction—all the Chandler Noir and Tolkien Fantasy—and I draw on it in my work. But I also often find I'm going all over the map. I like cowboys in my space opera and robots in my mysteries, and I keep hoping to find dragons in The New Yorker.
Right now, I'm working on one story that's far-future sf, another that's urban fantasy with zombies and evil killer robots, a third that might be described as steampunk (though probably only if the describer had already had a few vodka tonics), a novel that contains nothing particularly supernatural, and a TV series that's sort of realism, with a comic, absurdist edge. So I guess I'll find out what genre I work best in!
Are you into the Ebook/Kindle thing? It is hurting print sales right now.
Maybe e-books aren't good for print, but hopefully they'll be good for publishing. I have to say that since getting a Kindle, my own book-buying has increased by about 1500 percent. For someone who travels, who spends a lot of time in places where there's just no access to a good spectrum of English-language books, who worries about luggage weight limits, having a library in a device is kind of revolutionary. Now I'm reading stuff I've wanted to check out for years, but buying and lugging the books around was just too much hassle.
I still love paper books, and I'm sure I will continue to buy them in the future. But I imagine I will probably think about their quality as objects quite differently than I did before.
In that sense, I think e-books could force a substantial re-thinking of what it means to buy a book. I imagine that the production of cheap paperbacks is really going to collapse, or at least go very downmarket. Publishers will need to create a new vision of what they're offering. Maybe that will mean focusing on beautiful, uniquely-designed editions; things you'd want to have on a shelf for years. The book as artwork. Or maybe it'll be personalized printing: I kind of dream of the day when I can walk into B&N, buy an e-book, buy a piece of art for a cover, pick a typeface and have it printed on the spot. (Acid free paper or regular? Would you like a latte with that?) Or it could be something else altogether.
I know the transitions that are coming to all kinds of media are going to be messy and painful. But I can't quite bring myself to be upset by the possibility of a big cultural change, even if it is kind of terrifying.
What about popular media? Can it have a profound effect on someone’s mind? Have a negative influence on the public, depending on how it is represented?
I guess I've always fallen in with the folks who say that dividing "high" art from "popular" art is a little bit silly. Shakespeare was writing plays for the mob, & etc. Maybe through some strange accident of fate, future generations will judge 20th century American society by How I Met Your Mother. OK, that doesn't seem too appealing, but I don't think art has to be analyzed entirely through the lens of how one society sees it, right now.
A lot of my favorite art recently has been on TV. The long-running, episodic TV show offers a forum for an amazing kind of storytelling. You get to live with characters for ages, growing up or growing old with them. Having that kind of a relationship with a fictional person can really be quite profound! Of course, most shows don't really take advantage of that, but there are a few that do, and they're great.
I heard Jane McGonigal on On the Media earlier this year, and she was saying that the average 21-year-old in a country with a strong video-game culture will have spent almost as much time playing games as in secondary school. That's pretty profound, too. Her takeaway: if we can find out what we're learning from these games, and utilize it, we could change the way the world works.
Rock 'n' roll can save your life. Half-Life, apparently, can save the planet. Pop culture is a powerful thing.
And it can be dangerous too—there are people like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and Sherry Turkle to tell you that. I think everyone today should read some media theory—a bit of McLuhan, maybe Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death or Thomas de Zengotitia's Mediated. Or just listen to Brooke and Bob on NPR. We live in a sea of information now, and thinking about what that means can really change your perspective. There's promise and peril in a world where we're all constantly connected, all creating, all receiving. It's another terrifying transition—but that's the stuff that sci-fi stories are made of!
Are you first and foremost a fiction writer or a journalist?
Both. Working on nonfiction kind of charges the batteries for fiction; imagination is broadened by experience. Journalism has been my passion, and it's been my day job. Fiction writing has always been there, and I'm hoping to do more of it. Right now I'm not doing as much reporting as I have in the past. I needed a bit of a break, and I wanted to focus on the novel I'm writing … trying to write … arguing with loudly in the early morning …
So far, I've found, a first novel is pretty much like a first serious girlfriend. You're totally infatuated, but neither of you really knows what you want. There's drunken fights and broken crockery, and one of the two of you will end up saying things you wish you could take back. But when it's good, it's great.
I'm not saying too much about the book yet, except that it's a thriller, with a lot of influences from noir, and a few from other places, and that it's set in the developing world. Hopefully it'll be worth reading when the dust settles. And when it does, I expect it'll be about two days before I'm off looking for some exciting new thing to report on and learn about. All writing is exploration, I think—the real questions are what and where.