Your initial vocation was as an artist; how and where did the switch to writing take place?
Actually, it wasn’t my vocation, it was my course of study. I grew up wanting to be a comic book illustrator, and I wrote and drew my own comics as a teenager, all of them derivative, and probably not terribly well drawn either. I did paint a few portraits for money while I was a student. It wasn’t until much later, the 1990s, that I worked for a decade as a graphic artist and all the art school training finally got used.
The switch to writing started after my second year as an art major. I took a night class in creative writing. Short stories just started emerging like shrapnel (oblique way of saying that they weren’t remotely publishable stories), but the more I wrote fiction the less I felt like painting. It was as if I could focus on one or the other but not both, and I had to make up my mind. And then circumstances kind of made my mind up for me. While I was in class one afternoon my apartment caught fire. Three years of oil paintings and charcoal sketches went up—oil-covered canvas and paper make great kindling.
The weird part was that, on the kitchen table I had a crappy little Royal plastic typewriter, and it had melted into a puddle, but one of the windows had blown out at the precise moment the fire reached the table, and the fire had gone up and over the table, so that the manuscript of a short story lying next to the typewriter remained intact. That was my cosmic road sign: Get Off Here. The last part of that year in school I joined a writing workshop led by poet Gary Gildner, and tried to write a science fiction novel, which proved to be about 70 pages when I was done and was just awful. But by that point the addiction was growing. You know, I’ll watch a movie and check out the bios on the cast afterwards, and am amazed how many say “He was studying to be a lawyer when for the heck of it he took an acting class, and the rest is history.” Yes, it really does work that way: One little misstep and the craft gets into your blood and then there really is no help for you.
In what particular ways does writing in the fantasy and sf genres suit your style?
Really, I seem to be hard-wired for fantasy. There’s a story I wrote called “The Bus” that’s the result of me walking home from work in the dead of winter in Philadelphia, and coming across a guy sleeping on a steam vent. At the same moment down the block the doors on an Atlantic City casino bus opened to let someone get on, and in an instant I had a story combining those two elements, and it was a very nasty bit of fantasy fiction cum social commentary on the Reagan years.
The ideas I get, they’re never “normal.” For years I would explain to writing classes the difference between mainstream fiction and fantasy fiction with the example of a story about the erosion of the American family today. In a mainstream story, I might explore how the parents had stopped communicating, how the children were alienated, latch-key kids who had to define life for themselves. In a fantasy story, I could make the metaphor real and actually have the family eroding under stress. You could write those two very different stories and strike the same notes with each. But my sensibility immediately gravitates toward the weird one and the other doesn’t interest me in the slightest. After I used that example for a few years I finally sat down and wrote it as “Collecting Dust.”
In Gregory Frost Talks Style the auhtor talks about the writer recognizing their own style and the authors who have influenced him
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