Fantastic Metropolis

Jeffrey Ford: I found the writing styles of Waking Beauty and Tumbling After quite different. Was your experience in writing them also markedly different?

Paul Witcover: Very different. After Waking Beauty, I pitched and sold my next novel, to be called Pynn, on the basis of a couple of chapters and an outline. I set down to work… and the writer’s block I had thought vanquished forever came back with a vengeance. I realized later that I had poured so much of myself into Waking Beauty that there was nothing left. I had to give my imagination time to recharge. But I didn’t understand that at the time. Instead, I sweated my way through one draft of that book, which was similar to what became Tumbling After, only focusing more on Jack and Jilly as adults, and featuring a comic book instead of a role-playing game as the gate to the alternate or parallel reality. I turned it into my editor at HarperCollins and waited for her feedback. That was in 1999, I believe. A couple of months went by without any word, and in that time I realized that I’d just parted with 600+ pages that I would be ashamed to see in print. I’d rather never see anything of mine in print than have to cringe at something that never should have been published. Once you lose the ability to smell your own crap, you’re finished as a writer. So I took it back, trashed it, started over. Or tried to. Because by that time, I had lost the ability to form a sentence. The sheer number of possibilities in phrasing an idea, or describing an event, character, or scene, which words to use, and in which order, was paralyzing. No one choice seemed inherently better than any other, so I found myself unable to choose between any of them. I had to learn how to write all over again, and I think that’s what accounts for the difference in styles. That, and the fact that different books require different styles.

Jeffrey Ford: I know it took you quite a number of years after the publication of Waking Beauty to finish Tumbling After. Do you normally work very slowly and carefully or were there other factors at play?

Paul Witcover: I do work slowly, revising obsessively as I go, so that was part of the reason, in addition to the factors mentioned earlier. Once I was back on track, around 2001, about the time my brief tenure as science fiction editor for Time-Warner’s iPublish imprint came to an end (along with the imprint itself), the book took me two years to write. That’s still a long time compared to some writers, but it’s not as dilatory-seeming as saying it took me seven years to write the damn thing, which is technically true.

Jeffrey Ford: The theme of sexuality has a place of prominence in both Waking Beauty and Tumbling After. You deal with this aspect of the human condition in very original ways. Do you think your contemporaries in the field of fantastic literature deal with this theme satisfactorily or does it too often get overlooked or clichéd?

Paul Witcover: I think it’s very difficult to write about sex in an original way. And growing more so all the time, as our culture becomes increasingly sexualized, and every aspect of sex and sensuality, all eros, is commercialized. Many fantasy writers either ignore sex, as they do other bodily functions, or write about it in a clichéd romantic style, or use it as a metaphor for magic (or magic as a metaphor for sex). Science fiction is pretty much the same, although there’s more of an opening in sf “to boldly go where no one has gone before.” Some writers try to be shocking, which by now is itself a cliché. I admire writers who approach the subject playfully yet seriously, with the fear and reverence and imagination that it deserves. This aspect of literature has always been the province of those few whose obsessions take them there. For some it’s at the center of everything; for others, it scarcely exists. Sexuality is not at the center of my writing universe, but it is a strange attractor.

Jeffrey Ford: The vicissitudes of adolescence play a big part in Tumbling After. Are Jack’s experiences in any way similar to your own while growing up or perhaps based upon them?

Paul Witcover: The setting of Tumbling After is the summer house my family has at the Delaware shore, where I’m writing these lines. The house, the beach, the bay: all that is as accurately portrayed as I could make it given the demands of the story. But I didn’t share any of Jack’s experiences, thank God! Though I certainly drew upon psychological and emotional realities from my childhood and adulthood in describing those experiences and their effects on Jack and those around him.

Jeffrey Ford: The imagination is a powerful force in adolescence. To what degree and in what ways do you think it might be dangerous?

Paul Witcover: Well, just read Romeo and Juliet. In adolescence, you have the onset of complex adult emotions and powerful hormonal changes combined with breathtaking stupidity, a need for rebellion, and a belief in personal immortality. This is a volatile mix! Imagination is always dangerous. Many adults are scared of the imagination of kids: just look at the police-state paranoia that surrounds the schools today, with kids expelled or arrested on the basis of their writings, tested for drugs, suspected of every vice and evil. It’s insane. We as a nation are frightened of our own children: they are like our own little terrorists. It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy; it would serve us right. But I’m more worried about the lack of imagination in adults than the excess of it in children. That’s the real danger, as our current administration seems hell-bent on proving.