I like your description of interstitial fiction as 'colouring outside the lines' and 'mixing up colours with the same components'. How does interstitial, or slipstream, co-exist with more traditional fantasy and sf genres?
Honestly, I think it’s a flavour, or as that essay suggests, a new colour derived of blending the old ones in new ways. For a while it was the flavour of the month and all anybody was talking about. I think now it’s become embedded enough that an anthology will have interstitial or slipstream fiction mixed in with the traditional fantasy/sf and nobody much bats an eye...which is funny because I’ve turned in an essay on how to approach reading slipstream fiction for a Cambridge University Press book as if we all still need guidance.
We feel somehow that we need to quantify it, define it as different from the vanilla fantasy—this in a genre that’s supposed to be about difference and otherness. In any case, I think they coexist fine, and authors like Kelly Link, Ray Vukcevich, Christopher Barzak, and M. Rickert are blazing some wonderful, wonderful trails outside the lines. And that’s just an off-the-top-of-my-head quartet.
Who are some of the authors that influenced your writing?
Roger Zelazny is the one who comes to mind the most. There was a point where I wanted to be Roger Zelazny. I think I started with Lord of Light and then jumped back to The Dream Master and This Immortal, and then ate up everything he wrote in the ’60s. I’ll still pick up and reread a Zelazny novel now and again for sheer pleasure. Joe Haldeman influenced me as a teacher, as did T.C. Boyle. I studied under both of them at Iowa, and there’s no question of their influence. I’ve never consciously tried to imitate the style of either, although I did write one story that I think of as my T. Boyle story.
Let’s see, in genre: Gene Wolfe, R.A. Lafferty, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley. Probably everybody I read influences me in some fashion. Poe, Chekov, Nabokov…I don’t know. That’s an argument for reading good fiction regardless of categorization. As a teenager I read absolutely awful stuff, too. Movie and TV tie-ins mostly, but also a lot of Leslie Charteris books.
When I first attempted to write a story, that’s who I was reading and so I tried to imitate Charteris’s empurpled linguistic adornment. This was a right dreadful idea. And while I still find “Saint” stories fun to read now and again, I recognize what a terrible mistake it was taking the style as some sort of template. I probably spent years undoing that damage—which is to say you can be influenced by bad writing as well as good, especially when you’re naïve and haven’t figured out the difference. There’s a reason you’re made to study Shakespeare and Austen and Melville and Conrad, children.
How does a writer get to that moment when he or she realises that they now have a style, a unique way of saying something?
To borrow from my art classes, I had a painting instructor who explained that everybody initially starts out trying to paint like someone else. They study great art, experimental art, immerse themselves in the art scene around them, and then set out to make something that reminds them of something they’ve encountered. So maybe you try to paint like Francis Bacon, or Van Gogh, or Edward Hopper. You try impressionism, cubism, any-ism, like you’re trying on outfits. And what happens as you identify and work with certain elements is that your own style emerges. Your voice. On the canvas, on the page, it’s the same thing.
I think quite often you find your voice while you’re focused on the other elements of writing. Everybody has a voice that they naturally write in if left on their own, but that voice isn’t necessarily a good one for fiction. You find your critical voice, I think, by writing. A lot. Like any craft, you have a skillset to master, and hardly anyone ever arrives like Athena, fully armoured and armed.
Ever written something that your publisher didn’t agree on?
Didn’t agree on…as in, they didn’t want it? I’m not sure. I’ve written things that an editor and I quibbled over. There are points where I’ve appreciated what they bring to the table and have changed the text, and points where changes were made and I put things back.
On a listserve I subscribe to, just the other day an author I’ve known for a long time was telling us how with one of her early novels, someone on the editorial staff rewrote her last chapter without telling her, after she thought the book had been copy-edited and done, and that’s how it came out, with somebody else’s last chapter, “for her own good” you know. Me, I think that’s grounds for justifiable homicide. I think I’ve been fortunate with both editors and copy-editors. Keith Clayton, my editor on the Shadowbridge duology, was just great to work with. He got what I was up to, and every suggestion of his made the books better.
In Gregory Frost Takes on the Recession the author talks about how the current recession may influence publishing.
