Fantastic Metropolis

Jeffrey Ford: When did you first decide that you wanted to be a writer?

Paul Witcover: I remember in fifth grade having the epiphany that I could become a poet, and from that point on, I think I always knew that I was going to be a writer. It wasn’t really a decision, more like a recognition about myself.

Jeffrey Ford: Did the fact that your father is a writer influence your choice to also write? Was his vocation ever a hindrance to you pursuing yours? What does he think of your books?

Paul Witcover: My dad’s a journalist who’s published ten or eleven non-fiction books about the American political scene, and one novel. His memoirs, The Making of an Ink-Stained Wretch, are coming out this fall. Obviously, he was a big influence, both positive and negative. Every boy wants nothing more than to be like his dad, but only until he wants nothing less. I remember Saturday mornings when I was a kid, my sisters and I would wake up to the sound of the typewriter keys clacking madly downstairs. Ti-ti-ti-type-type. So from an early age, I understood the work ethic required, and I also had some insight into the publishing process. All that was very helpful.

My dad doesn’t really get my stuff, though he does read it. He can appreciate the writing on the level of craftsmanship, at least sometimes, but he’s not at all into spec fic of any kind, and I think for better or worse you need a certain familiarity with the genre in order to get into my books. My mom was an English teacher and editor, and she was as much or more of an influence, especially in espousing a level of artistic perfection that is impossible to meet but worthy of striving for. She passed away before I could finish Tumbling After, I’m sorry to say. The book is dedicated to both of them.

Jeffrey Ford: Fairy Tales, Nursery Rhymes, Folk Tales, Myths, seem to be lurking in the background of both your novels, Waking Beauty and Tumbling After (Jack and Jill). Even your e-mail address gives a nod to a famous fairy tale. What is it about these archetypal stories that interests you in relation to your own work? When did they become important to you?

Paul Witcover: They’ve always been important to me. One of the first books I remember possessing was the wonderful Greek Myths by the D’Aulaires, a copy of which I still own and treasure. I would leaf through those oversized pages and absorb the illustrations and stories for hours and hours. The last page of that book, which depicts the head from a shattered statue of Zeus blindly contemplating the constellations, struck me as unutterably sad and deeply unfair. I didn’t want the reign of Zeus and the Olympians to end! That was probably the first grudge I consciously carried against grim Jehovah, but not the last. Later, it was the fairy books of Andrew Lang that I devoured, finding in them some of the same captivating magic of the Greek myths. Myths, fairy tales, nursery rhymes: they are primal material, perfect in a way that no considered work of art can ever be. They are spontaneous growths of the human mind and spirit, and that’s why I think I strive for a similar organic development in my own stories; I want them to exfoliate in the manner of the timeless myths and legends, to give some analog of that feeling the reader had when he or she first encountered those old tales. They contain all our past as a species, and, I’m convinced, all our future too.

Jeffrey Ford: Your novel work is so uniquely original, I really want to know what works and writers had the greatest influences on you. A couple of the reviews I read for Tumbling After mentioned Delany, Dick, Crowley. Are any of these guys likely suspects? Who else?

Paul Witcover: Oh boy. Delany, definitely. When I was in high school, he was like a god to me, right up there with Bowie and other members of my personal rock pantheon. Dhalgren was my writing bible for a long time; at Clarion, in 1980, Algis Budrys taught me a valuable lesson by calling me Samuel R. Witcover. I was also really into Phil Dick, and in Tumbling After I wanted to duplicate some of that paranoid atmosphere that he conveys so well, and also the notion of the arbitrariness of reality. I admire Crowley’s work more than I can say, his lucid style and his ability to tap into the mythic source, in which I think he is virtually unrivaled, although Liz Hand gives him a run for his money, in my opinion. Her connection to myth is darker, more dangerous, but also more ecstatic, it seems to me. Apollo and Dionysus. I went to Clarion with Lucius Shepard, and from the first story he submitted, it was clear that he was something special, as his subsequent career has confirmed. It was not only his subject matter but his approach to it that was illuminating for me. I’m an admirer of Michael Moorcock, who I think is vastly underrated as a writer. Mother London is one of the great books of the last century. Gene Wolfe, whose novels have grown more opaque and mysterious even as he strips all ornament from his style. These writers have all been big influences on me, and in some cases still are. Outside the genre, Proust, Nabokov, Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner come to mind. At least, those are the writers whose gravity was the hardest for me to fight free of.

Jeffrey Ford: You write a monthly book review column for the magazine Realms of Fantasy. This must put you in pretty close contact with what is going on in speculative fiction these days. What kinds of trends have you noticed, if any? What is your assessment of the general quality of the work being published? What aspects of it excite you and what do you find less than satisfactory?

Paul Witcover: If Sturgeon were alive and reviewing today, he would have to up his percentage of crap considerably, for a couple of reasons. First is the prevalence of gaming and movie tie-ins, almost all of which are bad. And even if well-written, they are pernicious in effect. Next is the flood of self-published, print-on-demand books, which by and large are even worse, with a few notable exceptions involving work too daring or outrageous or strange to find a mainstream publisher or even a small press publisher. So that’s kind of depressing, as is the fact that as far as mainstream and reputable small press work goes, Sturgeon’s law applies as much as ever. But there is still a lot of interesting, praiseworthy work being done today, and in fact I think we’re seeing something of a revitalization of fantasy, or of different branches of the genre. There is the Tolkienesque fantasy, which George R.R. Martin was the first to really substantially advance, I think. Other writers have followed him in this project of both going back to the intense world-building of Tolkien and moving beyond him in literary craftsmanship and in the idea of what, exactly, heroic or epic fantasy can be or should be. I’m thinking particularly of Steven Erikson and R. Scott Bakker here. Cecilia Dart-Thornton is writing epic fantasies that are fascinating in their radical embrace of the traditional. Then there’s a branch that more or less explicitly repudiates Tolkien and takes for its models writers like Peake, Moorcock, M. John Harrison, Vance, and so on. Writers in this camp are people like Miéville and K. J. Bishop. My good friend Ysabeau Wilce’s first novel will be published soon, and though I won’t be reviewing it, I’ll predict here that it will take the genre by storm; her voice and world are among the most unique and compelling I’ve ever encountered. Then there is the branch of urban fantasy brought into being almost single-handedly by Crowley in Little, Big. I feel that Liz Hand is the outstanding practitioner here. But I don’t want to be too dogmatic. What’s interesting to me is how the best writers draw from a number of traditions to fashion something that feels new: Lucius Shepard, Gene Wolfe, Kelly Link, Crowley himself, and Harrison, and Hand: all of these writers are pointing the way forward in fantasy, and a lot of younger writers are starting to follow their lead. It’s an exciting time to be a reviewer.

Jeffrey Ford: What are your writing habits?

Paul Witcover: I’m up at 5:30 in the morning. I grab breakfast, brew coffee, get the headlines off the internet, and am at work by 6. I work with as much quiet as is possible in a small New York City apartment across the street from a fire house; I even use a white-noise generator. I write until about 9:30 or 10, then I’m pretty much done with my own stuff for the day. The rest of the time is devoted to the freelance work that actually pays my bills, some of which is relatively creative and fun, and some of which is drudgery.

Jeffrey Ford: I don’t think most readers are aware of the fact that you wrote a biography of Zora Neale Hurston for younger readers. How did that project come about? You commented to me that her life would make an incredible movie. Why?

Paul Witcover: Andy Duncan published a story called “Zora and the Zombie” in SciFiction last year. It’s set during one of Hurston’s folklore-gathering expeditions to Haiti, and there’s very little in the story, including its fantastic elements, that couldn’t be true. That’s the kind of life Hurston had; she seemed to radiate a reality-distorting field around her. I got the gig through a friend of mine who was also doing YA books on black Americans for the same publisher—Terry Bisson did a few books in the series as well. I chose Hurston because I was an admirer of her work, and because I felt that there was something a little too self-serving about Alice Walker’s well-publicized rescue of Hurston from literary obscurity. I wanted to do something for her memory that wasn’t tainted by self-promotion or by the desire to tailor her life into an exemplary or inspirational tale “for today’s youth,” as they say. Hurston’s life was inspirational and exemplary, but on her own terms, which were very much politically incorrect and more self-serving even than Alice Walker at her most grandiose. It pains me to say so, but if she were alive today, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Hurston were a big-time Bush supporter. She’s most famous for Their Eyes Were Watching God, a wonderful book, but Moses, Man of the Mountain, which retells the story of Moses in an African-American setting and vernacular, is powerful and strange. And her folklore collections, Tell My Horse and Mules and Men, are books of value to anyone who wants to write fantastic fiction about America.

Jeffrey Ford: Please describe your foray into comics—how it came about, some of the differences between producing effective scripts and effective fiction, the experience of working with your collaborator, Liz Hand.

Paul Witcover: My foray into comics took place about ten years ago. I’d love to do more, but the opportunity hasn’t come my way. It originally came to Liz, via a friend of ours who worked at DC Comics, Rob Simpson, a great guy. When Liz called to tell me that she’d been offered the chance to pitch a comic, I shamelessly horned in on the action. I’ve always loved comics, read them obsessively as a kid and amassed a huge collection, which I foolishly sold in my teenage years when I was desperate for ready cash, and then rebuilt. I’ve got a thousand or so here at the house in Delaware, mostly mainstream stuff, DC and Marvel, though I no longer read them regularly, for the same reason I don’t play D&D anymore. But there is amazing stuff going on in comics, or graphic novels, or whatever the hell they want to call themselves. It’s weird, but comics are now a more respected art form than either science fiction or fantasy!

Liz and I had collaborated on short fiction before we did the short-lived comic that became Anima. We’ve been friends for a long time, and our tastes in just about everything, from fiction to music to art, are remarkably similar. So collaborating with Liz is really like collaborating with another me, who happens to be a much better writer and has a wilder imagination as well. No down side there!

As Sin City has so vigorously demonstrated, if any doubt still existed in anyone’s mind, comics are a cinematic rather than a literary medium. So writing for comics is essentially writing for film: you produce a script, not a story. And the dynamic elements of a scene, its visual possibilities, must always be foremost in your mind. You are telling a story with images, not with words. I was helped immeasurably in honing my comic-book style by the first Sandman collection, which contains one of Neil Gaiman’s annotated scripts. Going through that frame by frame was a graduate school lesson in writing for comics. Understatement, or no statement, can be a powerful tool in comics, but in fiction it’s generally less effective, unless you’re trying to do a Raymond Carver kind of thing. I’d like to see some comic books made of his work, come to think of it. Anyway, Liz and I would switch off halves of the comic from issue to issue. We’d plot the thing together in a rough way, then I’d write, say, the first half of the script and send it to her. She’d go over that, make suggestions, and then send it back to me with the second half of the script. I would then review her suggestions, make whatever changes seemed advisable, and then make suggestions on her half. We never once had a significant disagreement, and we both had a great time. It paid pretty well, too!

Jeffrey Ford: Waking Beauty is a wonderfully original tale; really striking in its themes and imagination. What gave rise to it? And what was your experience in writing it—was it carefully plotted from the start or did the story occur to you as you typed, extemporaneously?

Paul Witcover: Waking Beauty began as a story I was working on for class; this was back in 1991, when a combination of frustration with my career, or lack thereof, and writer’s block had made me desperate enough to go back to school. I came up with the idea giving the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty a feminist spin. The story took on a life of its own right from the start, and my writer’s block was swept away, never to return—or so I thought at the time.

Soon it was clear that this was not a story, but a novel, and that it wasn’t a fantasy as I’d originally thought, but a piece of science fiction masquerading as a fantasy. I had to design a world, a history, a religion, a culture, mythology, all of which I did by riffing off (or, if you prefer, ripping off) things I remembered from childhood, interests and obsessions I’d had, things I’d loved unreservedly, like Tintin and his dog, Snowy, and things I had a more complex relationship with, like the Roman Catholic Church. I knew what the ending of the novel was going to be in a very rough sense, but how to get there, and what happened along the way, all sort of grew up organically out of the forward progress of the narrative. Often something I had written would necessitate going back to layer in more details of the Hierarchate’s immense back-story, which would in turn imply plot details still to occur. I don’t know if you write this way or not, Jeff, but it’s not the most efficient way of constructing a story! Yet the sense of being swept up in something already existent, that I’m not so much creating as uncovering, was and is the coolest thing about writing for me, and that was true in spades with Waking Beauty.

Jeffrey Ford: How would you describe your new novel, Tumbling After?

Paul Witcover: On my website I call it: “a novel about growing up, about playing games, about what is and isn’t real. It’s a novel of sexual awakening and magical transformation.”

During the writing, I thought of it as the anti-??Waking Beauty??: a fantasy masquerading as science fiction. And where the structure of my first novel was a spiral that looped inward only to exit its own singularity, this one I saw as a Moebius strip from which no escape would be possible. But that doesn’t necessarily mean no change is possible in its endless iterations. I don’t like to impose a particular reading on my fiction, and I hope that readers will come to different conclusions about what happens at the end of Tumbling After, and beyond.

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.

Jeffrey Ford: In Tumbling After, the role-playing game, Mutes and Norms, plays an integral part, linking Jack’s and Kestrel’s worlds. Were these types of games something you were into as a kid or still are? Had you given the phenomenon of these games much thought before writing this novel?

Paul Witcover: I was a big D&D player, from high school through college and beyond. I still have the original boxed set somewhere. Tumbling After actually has twin dedications, which is only appropriate: the first to my parents, as mentioned, but also to the three friends who journeyed most with me across those miles of graph paper. I can’t begin to count up the hours I spent rolling dice, smoking pot, drinking beer, listening to prog-rock bands and, slightly later, punk bands too, while piloting my alter-ego of the moment through adventures as stirring and involving as the myths I had devoured as a boy. They were some of the happiest times of my life. But I don’t play any more. Such games demand too much time, and I give too much to them. Still, it was fun to revisit D&D in Mutes and Norms, figuring out the game-playing rules, how the dice would work, and so on, some of which made it into the novel. And I use dice—a 6-sided, 4-sided, and 8-sided—in reading from the novel.

Jeffrey Ford: Tumbling After has that marvelous parallel structure, one half resonating with, informing and illuminating, the other. While writing the book did you favor one side over the other? Both are very well done, but I was wondering if in the writing you found one a pleasure to write and the other more difficult? If so, which was which, and why do you think that was the case?

Paul Witcover: The Jack and Jilly stuff didn’t exactly come easier, but the material was already there. I mean, it’s set in a place that really exists, and both characters and action are derived from actual things, though not in a literal sense. But there was less outright invention there than extrapolation, I would say. Plus, I’d been thinking about that material for many years, even before I began the ill-fated Pynn. The origins of Tumbling After go back to a play I began to write in the late eighties called Decline of the Doones. I still like that title.

The Mutes and Norms stuff was excruciatingly difficult, and I’m happy to hear that you think it works. I wanted it to begin in a rather clichéd manner and then progress toward greater and greater reality, a reality that would be grounded both in ongoing parallels with the Jack and Jilly story and through slowly accumulating details about the world inhabited by Kestrel and the other mutes, as well as their own development as characters. By the end I wanted the two storylines, one of realism elevated to the fantastic, the other of the fantastic made real, to become equivalent, interchangeable within the structure of the book. I can’t tell you how much of the Kestrel material I threw away, how often I had to start over almost from scratch because the old bullshit detector kicked in. I was never satisfied that I had reached my goal with that material, and frankly, I’m still not satisfied with it. Finally though, there came a point when I felt I couldn’t get any closer, and the result is a book I’m very proud of, even if, inevitably, it’s not the book I set out to write.

Jeffrey Ford: Do you think that the relationship between the two worlds in the novel is an apt metaphor for the way in which the literature of the fantastic, in general, interacts with, investigates, enhances, and explicates a reader’s day to day life? Is the book autobiographical, not of your life experience, but of your relationship with the literature of the fantastic?

Paul Witcover: That’s a fascinating question or series of questions. The answer is yes to all of them. I was talking to Liz Hand just today about the consoling aspects of fiction. In many cases, that consolation—by which I mean consolation to the implacable facts of life—comes about through the fantastic. I suppose religion has the same function for some. But for me, it’s literature. In the novel, of course, I focus as much or more on the dark side of the equation, where consolation turns to curse.

Jeffrey Ford: What are you working on now? Are there other stories or books in the offing?

Paul Witcover: I’m working on a for-hire project that involves Dracula, but I can’t say anything more about it now. I’m shopping a short-story collection around, no takers as yet. And once Dracula is done, I have another novel in mind, which I’m eager to start.

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Paul Witcover’s Tumbling After is published by HarperCollins. You can read an excerpt right here at Fantastic Metropolis.