Continuing my
Authors on Xanga Series I am interviewing
Graham Worthington his Xanga site is
darkoozeripple
Graham has published three books
“Wake of the Raven”
Wake of the Raven is a story of the world's corruption,
of forbidden desire and its awful consequences.
Read more HERE
“Zorn”
This is a futuristic novel that follows a holiday romance
in the bisexual society of 2035
Read more about it HERE
He has also published a collection of 30 Xangan writers last year in
“Xangans”
When did you get into writing?
Was it something you studied for,
or did you make a decision to do it later?
Where do your ideas come from?
Can you study for writing? I didn’t, I went in for engineering. I’m a practical type;
I studied how to fix things. But I can’t name any writer who’s ever made a point of saying you must take courses first. You need to be a reader, and to love reading and stories,
that’s the main thing. I did, and that’s where the writing came from.
If you don’t love reading, forget about writing. But once you’ve started,
you definitely need to study the craft. It’s a joy, but it’s also work,
hard work, and you have to learn the ways to get around its difficulties and limitations.
To write a novel was an interest that grew into an ambition, but it took a long time to grow from a little seed. It always hung in the back of my mind, all my life. I started as a kid. I was about eleven, and I wrote part of a science fiction story. It didn’t go very far, just a page or so. Later in life – a lot later – I got an idea for a novel, and I chewed on it for months. Finally I thought “look how the years have passed,” grabbed a blank page and started. I think a lot of my motivation came from frustration with work and the economy. We put so much time into these things, and finally we’re let down, and then we wonder why we grind away at this world and let our dreams slide. So I started writing down the words that were to flesh out my story…
and after a few hours had three pages of clunky garbage. “Quit,”
I thought, “you can’t do it. It’s just a silly, childish dream you’ve had all your life,”
but then “no, keep at it. Why not, you may get better.” And slowly I did.
By the time I was at about 30,000 words (about 90 pages)
I felt that I knew what I was doing.
I had to go back and re-write a lot of course, but I work that way normally,
writing new material, and then re-writing the old, using the perception
I’ve gained from writing the new.
The main thing I’ve learned about writing is something very internal and essential:
there’s a vast difference between having a glowing vision of a major, brilliant, entertaining story, and turning that vision into a unified, coherent flow of words that paint that vision into the mind of the reader. Inspiration is essential, but it’s just a glow, a flash of emotion in the mind, and writing is the difficult, often tedious process of giving it solid form.
Has Xanga helped you as a writer? If it has, how?
Xanga’s a mixed blessing. It brings together widely separated people who have a common interest in something. For many people the something is just the fun of communicating with others, but to me the something is writing. In all cases though, there has to be an interest in interacting using words or pictures. It would be difficult to play a hockey game by blogs and comments.
So writing’s important on Xanga, and naturally writers tend to hang out here, but not as much as they used to. The place has gone down a bit; too many trolls, and too much drama over nothing. Even so, it still has a charm that the other systems have always lacked, and most of the writers that I know I first met on Xanga. So yes, it helped me. It’s important to get feedback from other writers, and a lot more convenient than going out in November weather to a writer’s group in a drafty library, like I did in Manchester a few years ago. Mind you, we got the readings and feedback bit over briskly and went to the pub afterwards, which we can’t do on Xanga, so I have to chalk a win up for the real life library there.
On the other hand, if somebody wanted to read about twenty pages of his stream-of-consciousness junk, you couldn’t flee after the first ten with hands over ears, because we’d all agreed to a code of cooperation and tolerance. The freedom to leave – because you’re not really there – that Xanga gives would have been welcome. That’s an important principle to adopt if you ever set up a writer’s group by the way; the Manchester group realized they needed to practice tolerance when the group nearly disintegrated in its early days, so I got the benefit of what they’d learned the hard way. Perhaps that’s a useful lesson to apply to Xanga?
I think so, but unfortunately I can’t solve the after-session beer-lack problem.
Most of the writers using Xanga who’ve published in print
tend to be rather quiet and hide away in dark Xanga corners.
They don’t usually blog much or get involved in Xanga drama.
Too busy brooding on plots, editing their latest manuscript,
or reading nerdy books on style or grammar.
Those latter two are very good for leaving you feeling drained and burnt out.
What advice would you give to other writers or want-to-be writers?
As we’re on Xanga right now, this is a great opportunity to say that Xangan writers should stick together and find ways to fight the system. That’s what’s frustrating all writers now, whether they’re good or bad; the publishing system. It’s indifferent to quality, and it’s averse to risking money on unknown writers. The self-publishing companies are useless at generating publicity. It’s up to groups of indie authors to collectively find their own ways.
Regarding actually writing a novel, which is more interesting than discussing publishing companies… That’s a tricky question. I don’t have any vast, comprehensive knowledge that I can hand out as though I’m an authority, but just what I’ve learned by writing a couple of fiction novels. But I’ll have a shot.
Bear in mind that this is just my opinion, and lots of things in writing are just opinion.
-First rule: start.
Certainly study, but as you go on, and as you need to. Study is not a substitute for starting. Starting is essential. Would you learn to drive a car if you’d no intention of ever owning one?
-Do not on any account try to write a novel, factual book or whatever.
Try to write a masterpiece on whatever you have to say,
with the attitude that it’s an impossible task, but you’re going to succeed somehow.
That way you may write something worth reading.
Don’t add to the junk out there.
-Don’t mess about forever with little pieces.
You haven’t started till you attempted something big,
and if you mess about with little pieces, you’ll never attempt anything big.
-Listen attentively to everything everyone tells you,
and silently ignore nearly all of it.
With writing, there is nothing easier to obtain than dumb suggestions. Be ingenious;
find ways of proving that your method works best. Look at how other writers do things.
You learn a lot that way. If you can’t prove it, only then start to consider taking the advice. Writing is a solitary path, and the general rule is that you know best.
-Never, ever stare at a blank page waiting for inspiration.
If you don’t know what to write, write an essay on what you like to write about,
but don’t know how. This will infallibly turn into part of what you wanted
to write in the first place.
This is part of what I call “associated writing.”
-Know your subject.
Of the two I’ve written so far, the first is historical fiction,
and I spent about a sixth of my writing time researching times I already knew a lot about,
and another sixth writing notes and little essays to make my understanding firm in my mind. That’s a full third spend on what I call “research and associated writing.”
My second was speculative fiction, set in the future, but I still had to do the research by writing essays on a non-existent world that I needed to exist.
-Rewrite and edit.
Jack Kerouac never did, but reader's interest in his times saved him from obscurity.
He’s famous for recording the era of the beatniks, the fifties, and cursed for only doing it half as well as he could. I spend about a third of my time rewriting. That’s two-thirds of my time accounted for, which means only one third is spent on the original writing.
Now I guess I’ve more than come to the end of my time here.
Thanks Seedsower, for this great opportunity to speak on your site
as one of Xanga’s many authors. It’s been great fun arranging my thoughts into –
I hope – some kind of useful form.
Thank you, Graham for this interview.
read more about Graham on his Amazon Page.
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