Jack Dann – Award Winning Author Shares his Keys To Writing Success
Jack Dann is something of a living legend in the world of speculative fiction. Born in New York State, he has lived in both the US and Australia during his long and successful career. In that time he has authored or edited more than seventy books including his bestselling novel The Memory Cathedral which took some six years to research.
He is the author of The Man Who Melted, High Steel (with Jack C. Haldeman II), The Silent, Bad Medicine and The Rebel, among other works.
He is a recipient of the Nebula Award, the Australian Aurealis Award (twice), the Ditmar Award (four times), the World Fantasy Award, the Peter McNamara Achievement Award, the Peter McNamara Convenors Award for Excellence, and the Premios Gilgamés de Narrativa Fantastica award. Dann has also been honored by the Mark Twain Society (Esteemed Knight).
In this interview he spoke about the craft of writing and what he saw as being the keys to writing success.
Darrell - Can you describe a typical day of writing?
Jack - Alas, I wish I could. Take today, we’re having major renovations done at the farm, so I spent some time terrified on the scaffolding, and went to my studio to write. I’ll have about three more hours to work, then will have to go to an appointment in a nearby town, which will take a few hours. Then back to the house, cook dinner, and maybe, just maybe, get some more work done. Other days I write at the house all day without interruption…or I spend a full day at the studio…or, if I’m at the flat in Melbourne, I’ll work there continuously for days. That’s actual writing. There is also the daily business e-mail, anthology work, and research…and other related tasks such as mentoring, etc.
Darrell - When you're writing a novel, do you plot the entire book in advance or work it out as you go?
Jack - Well…entire is a pretty big word! Some novels come to my mind visually, others come to mind as action: as plot. When the idea of my Civil War novel The Silent came to me, I glimpsed the plot as if it was a road winding out into the distance. The Memory Cathedral, on the other hand, came to me as a visual image of Gothic-looking aircraft passing over Florence. (I was having a drink in lobby of the Algonquin Hotel and reading a book about Leonardo da Vinci.) I later ‘discovered’ that the da Vinci novel was in the “What if” category. What if Leonardo could find a way to build the war machines he had composed like serene still-life’s on paper? What if he could see the results of his inventions on an actual field of battle? How would he react? Would that knowledge change him? I wrote the book to find out!
I always know the direction a book is going, but the plots never go quite where I intend. The process is an organic one for me and always full of surprises. With The Silent, I remember eavesdropping on my protagonist while I was daydreaming at my desk. So I wrote down what I ‘heard’. It became the prologue to the novel, written in Edmund “Mundy” McDowell voice.
This is it:
I wrote this, and then Uncle Randolph went over it and fixed my sentences and punctuation and broke everything up into sections and put in some of the quotations and fixed whatever else could be fixed. Uncle Randolph and Doctor Keys think it’s “therapeutical” for me to write down what happened. They think if I can just write about all the terrible things that happened, they’ll sort of go away or something and I won’t think they were all my fault.
I think that Uncle Randolph shouldn’t listen to doctors.
Anyway, I tried to write like everybody talked, but with some of the colored dialect it was hard to write it down, so I just did the best I could. Uncle Randolph went over that too. And he took out some of the swear words, which he said wouldn’t read well because he said I had too many of them, but he left some in so you could get a feel for the truth. He didn’t take out anything important, though, even though he said it made his heart sick to read it.
I don’t know about that.
It’s done now, and if anything’s wrong it’s probably my fault.
Anyway, it’s mostly true.
—Edmund “Mundy” McDowell
November 16, 1864
Scranton, Pennsylvania
I was half-way into the book when I wrote the bit above. What surprised me was to ‘discover’ that Mundy ‘composed’ that prologue in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But Scranton wasn’t supposed to be in the book! So…I had to figure out how he came to end up there. And that’s sort of how my plots get made.
Darrell - How do you get past writer's block?
Jack - I’ve always considered writer’s block—or what’s often called writer’s block—to be part of the natural process of writing. I’ll be writing day after day, and then everything will come to a complete stop.
That’s the signal that I need input. I need information. I need to do research. I need to feed my unconscious and then give it some time to work things out. So…I read anything that feels relevant, whether it is or not. I sleep a lot, watch television, go to movies, and try new cooking recipes. Then, suddenly, I’ll feel that nagging urge to write and will write until the little man who inhabits my unconscious tells me it’s time for another refill.
Darrell - Where do you get your ideas and inspiration?
Jack - Ideas are the easy part. When I give workshops, I’ll often pick up a magazine and pass it around to the writers. Might be Science News or The Economist or Wired…or Women’s Weekly. Anything will do. We always find more plot ideas just by flipping through the pages than we could write in a year. And that’s because ideas are everywhere. Jane Austen wrote about her little village where nothing much really ever happened; yet we’re still fascinated with the triumphs and disappointments of her characters.
Ideas are everywhere. Inspiration…well, that’s something else. Inspiration is just something that sometimes happens. Writing is about perspiration. Now if you work on a story until little droplets of blood appear on your forehead, then you might just find some of that oft-mentioned inspiration.
Darrell - What do you think is the secret to writing success?
Jack - Writing is the secret. Writing whenever you can. Writing wherever you can. Writing, reading, writing, and then writing some more.
Darrell - What would be the main advice you would give to new writers?
Jack - Don’t quit your day job. Write before you go to work. You must—ah, okay, here’s what I came up with years ago, an article I wrote for Writer’s Digest entitled “Keys to the Kingdom.” Do what it says. That’s all I got.
1. You must begin. Every day you must write, no matter what.
2. Being a professional simply means you write and publish. So even though you know you’re the next Hemingway or Faulkner, you’ll probably need a job. That’s good—it puts you in the midst of things, into the middle of life…you know, the stuff you want to write about.
3. Give the best part of every day to yourself. You must try to write every day!
4. Make appointments with yourself to write.
5. Copy. I don’t mean plagiarize, but find writers you admire, read and reread their best work, dissect their prose sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, memorize paragraphs if you have to, but get into the weave of the writer’s work. It will give an unconscious form and balance to your own work. Don’t worry, no one else will know. You will put these unconscious “forms” through your own sensorium. When you sit down to write, forget about your favorite authors.
6. Read constantly and widely.
7. Be prepared to be surprised and upset by what you write…and by what you think. Serious writing forces you to come to terms with yourself…forces you to explore private demons.
8. Don’t try to be a critic while you’re writing. Once you have a draft, or become blocked, then you must rethink and rework and be as hard on yourself as if you were writing for The New York Times Book Review.
9. If you’re having trouble with a sentence or a passage or a plot twist, ask yourself if something doesn’t need to be cut.
10. If you find yourself blocked, take a break and read. Take notes, read, take more notes. Usually a writer gets blocked when he or she needs more information. It’s a natural part of the process.
11. Trust your instincts. Your unconscious knows more than you do, so if you get an urge to buy a book on the flora of Afghanistan, buy it! Chances are in a week, month, or a year, you’ll need it.
12. Rewrite everything until you feel that what’s on paper corresponds as closely as possible to that wonderful image you originally had in your head.
13. Keep working toward making clear sentences and building solid story structures. Style is really only transparency of thought and idea.
14. Read and reread Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Then read it again.
15. And of course you must send your work out to editors. Don’t write long cover letters. When your manuscript is returned, send it out again…the next day!
16. The easier alternative to all of the above is…to remain a reader!
(This acknowledgment must appear with the work: “Keys to the Kingdom” by Jack Dann. Copyright (c) 1989 and 2000 by Jack Dann. First published in different form as “A Few Keys to the Kingdom: Thoughts on Getting Published, and on Being the Best Writer You Can Be” in Writer’s Digest 69 (January, 1989). All rights are reserved by the author. This article cannot be reprinted in ANY media without the author’s express permission.)
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