On Wednesday, February 19, the Word for Word Literary Series welcomed award-winning author Jeffrey Ford. He is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, The Twilight Pariah, Ahab’s Return, and Out of Body. His short story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, A Natural History of Hell, The Best of Jeffrey Ford, and Big Dark Hole. Ford’s fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies from Reactor [formerly tor.com] to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to McSweeney’s to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories and has been widely translated. His writing has garnered World Fantasy, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and Nebula awards, and a New York Times Notable Book of The Year mention.
After reading the short story, “Plunged in the Years,” Jeffrey Ford answered questions from the audience and from associate deans Jacob Powers and Paul Witcover.
Following is a transcript of that Q&A, edited for the page.
W4W: Do you often find that your work expands beyond the page and mind and echoes around in the real world?
JF: Sometimes. Sometimes you’re prophetic in what you do. I don’t know if there’s anything to it, but there’s also things I won’t write about because there’s a real close connection for me. When I see characters in my mind, I consider them real. I know they’re not, but I think of them that way, that they’re really people. There are certain things—I’m not even going to say what they are—but there are certain things I won’t write about because it scares me to do that. I know that sounds kooky, which it probably is.
W4W: Since you think of your characters as real people, do you feel a sense of obligation or responsibility, a kind of moral connection to them?
JF: The thing is, I don’t make the stories. I’m not making them. I’m discovering them. You know what I mean? I discover them as I go along. If I can go off on a tangent here for your students, I’m not world-building. It’s a term I can’t stand—”world-building.” It’s all over the place now. It’s like, where’s my wheelbarrow, my pick and ax? What am I, a fucking bricklayer?
Writing is not an architectonic, structured thing. What you’re doing is you’re using your imagination. Like over here, I create an ice-cream palace. It’s got the stairs going up to it. It’s got turrets. The flag is snapping in the wind and cracking, and so forth. I could see it in my mind’s eye. I didn’t build any of that.
The other thing is, I don’t plan. I’m not a planner. My teacher used to tell us, follow the character, and the character will take you to the story. I don’t know what the story is going to be. I really don’t. I’ve written historically inflected novels. And I do the research first, but then with the story I just let it go, and I follow it.
And that way, when you feel the surprise and what you discover the story to be, that energy is transferred to the reader. It’s very exciting. When you start planning stuff out and you’re putting the characters through their paces, like the puppet master of Titan, they lay down and die. They’re not going anywhere. You’re manipulating them through this thing.
And basically, it’s because young people or new writers, what they want to do is they want to make a point. They think that to be profound, they must make some great statement. Fiction writing isn’t about big ideas. It could have them in it. But what fiction writing is about is what happened and what happens next. And that’s all it’s about, really.
So I have kind of a different view. You’re driving down the road and you’re writing a story. Think of it as driving a car. You’ve got your hands on the wheel. You don’t want to screw up. You’ve got sweat on your brow. But the way I go about it, which seems, I guess, counterintuitive, is take your hands off the wheel, let the story take you. Let the story take you where it’s going to go. Don’t prescribe it. Don’t prescribe it. You have stories inside you you’re not even aware of. You have stories in your mind, and there are stories out there that you can discover.
So all this planning rigidity, it doesn’t work for me. It works for some people. And there’s a million ways to skin this cat. But for me, planning is the death knell to characters and story.
W4W: When I read “Under the Bottom of the Lake,” I felt like it was you telling readers, “This is how I write a story,” because it’s very much as you describe there. The narrator describes, basically, how the story is being written as it’s being written.
JF: That’s basically what happens in that piece. I see it. I saw it. And as I’m writing it, I’m telling the reader like, this is what I’m seeing. This is what’s happening. Then the story takes off. It gets really weird. I’m telling the story and commenting on how I feel while it’s going on. I don’t do too many like that, but that was one.
W4W: How do you know what container or vessel to fit your writing in? How do you know if you’re writing a short story or a novel?
JF: When I write novels, I have a little bit more of an idea of where things are headed. I know, basically, when it’s a novel or it’s a short story. But how I know I’ve got something is I get this giddy feeling inside. I feel giddy. I start laughing. And it’s not because the stuff’s funny. But I feel like it’s happening again. This is going to happen. I can feel it. And that’s how I know something’s good or it’s worth my while to pursue.
W4W: Do you find yourself often writing multiple stories at one time, or do you put your full focus into just one piece until it’s completed?
JF: I usually put my focus into a piece until it’s completed. If I’m writing a novel, I’ll get requests for short stories, and I’ll do those while I’m doing the novel, too. So, I write really fast, most of the time. Most of the time, but I have to think some. You have to think and follow the character sometimes for a while.
W4W: Has there ever been a time where you’re writing a character, and you realize that what you’re writing wasn’t originally what you pictured? And how do you incorporate that new direction into an already established character?
JF: That happens all the time. You’ve gotta be open to that as you go. And there’s no big deal to me. I just follow it. I go with it. I don’t get really that hung up on that stuff. All right, so this guy’s changing. He’s becoming something else. To me, that’s fun. That’s cool because like I said before, when you discover that, the story is showing you something. The story is revealing something to you. And that revelation is a surprise to me. But if I can capture the feeling of it, that will be a surprise to the reader as well. My feeling in writing fiction is I’m pushing into the fiction. And the more you push into it, the more it opens in front of you.
W4W: Would you say that’s true for almost any genre of fiction?
JF: Yeah. I’m a dark fantasy writer. I’m a science fiction writer. I’m a horror writer. I write weird, new weird, whatever fucking weird you want. I’m anything. When I first started years ago, they tried to get me to pledge allegiance to science fiction or fantasy. I wanted nothing to do with it, because I don’t know where the story’s going. I don’t know if it’s going to be science fiction or fantasy. And let me tell you they’re very closely linked, because somewhere down there, it all turns to bullshit.
It’s like, what’s a real science fiction story? Somewhere along the line, it’s fantasy, somewhere down there, deep as you go through the story. So, it’s all the same stuff. Romance writing, same thing. Not that I’ve written a romance yet, but it would be cool to do that.
W4W: Is that on your bucket list?
JF: Yeah, I gotta hurry up, though. I’m going to be 70 next year.
W4W: 70 is the new 50.
JF: There you go. That’s right. I’ve heard that. Yeah, yeah. But the only thing is sitting is the new smoking, so I’m thinking now they get me that way.
W4W: If you write a romance novel or story, you could always write about you and Lynn. You mentioned Lynn in this story, and she’s in quite a few of your more recent stories over the last few years. Can you talk a little bit about bringing those elements of your personal life and history and relationships into your fiction?
JF: Yeah, I got this technique from Isaac Bashevis Singer. I don’t know if any of your students know this writer. But he’s a terrific writer. He writes in Yiddish, and it’s translated into English. And I don’t know Yiddish at all. But I started reading his stuff. And he does this all the time.
That’s tough to do, to play the writer in a story. It’s something that you have to present without blinking. You can’t let on that you’re worried that the reader might not think you’re a writer. You’ve just got to go for it. After that, I bring elements in from my real life in the stories. Because here’s the thing, you’re trying to build– I almost used the word “build the world.” Sorry about that. But anyway, you’re trying to create this reality. And the more detail and fine detail you can bring to it, the more real the story seems. And the more real the story seems, the more you care about the characters.
Even if it’s a fantasy or a horror story, it’s got a monster or something, the more realistic detail you can bring to it, the more that you’re creating something that the reader is going to believe in. So, you bring those elements from your own life into the piece, and you start with them, and you build off them. And then somewhere that stuff takes a turn into this other thing and this other story.
Lynn’s been in a lot of my stories. I had an editor who just folded their press, Small Beer– if you know the writer Kelly Link, that’s her press. I did a couple of books with them. The editor, her husband, Gavin, said we should do a collection of the Lynn stories. There’s enough for a collection out there.
But that’s where I got that technique from. Singer. And he’s a good person to check out if you want to see a good short story writer. And he writes a lot of supernatural stories with dybbuks and those kind of things in them, like Jewish heritage-type weird supernatural stuff. Very
cool stuff, his work.
W4W: Here’s another question from the chat. How can I become a better dark fantasy writer? How can I balance the elements, so it feels more natural?
JF: I don’t want to put you off what your goal is, but why not just be just write a story? What kind of story do you have in you? Are you a dark fantasy writer? How do you know that until the story is written?
Just write the story. Then you can see what it is and name it. But I always tended toward that side of the field, too. And it’s not like anything I knew I was aware of. I didn’t set out to say I’m going to write a dark fantasy story. I’m just going to write a story. Try that and see what happens.
Details are important, though. In building the story and exploring metaphor and simile. It’s something that a lot of writers don’t use that much today. And sometimes it can be very powerful and effective in description.
W4W: What routines or rituals help you be as productive as you can be with your writing? Are there any tips that you could share with students who might be looking for something along those lines?
JF: I sit at the computer every day. I may not write anything, but I’m always there. You’ve got to be there when the lightning strikes. I sit every day for a certain period of time. I have a lot of time now because I’m retired from teaching.
Other things, I read a lot. You gotta read a lot. If you’re not reading a lot, there’s no sense in it, really. It’ll open your mind up. It’ll fill your head up with all kinds of cool ideas.
The other thing is that I do, that I don’t know if I would tell anybody else to do, is I never take notes. I don’t keep a journal. I don’t keep notes. Because what I like to do is, as the story is going, I let it mix around in my head. So I’m downtown at the grocery store squeezing melons, and the story is working in my head. If I kept a lot of notes and all that, I’d have to have my notes with me to get into it. So I don’t bother with that. It gets a little more daunting when you hit about 65, though. But yeah, I don’t bother with any of that.
The other thing is good advice I got from reading A Moveable Feast by Hemingway. I’m not a big Hemingway fan. I do like that book, though. He says write until you know what’s going to happen next, and then stop for the day so that when you come back tomorrow, you’ve got a place to start. So just read through what you did the day before, edit it a little, and then move on from there. And you have an impetus that’ll help you go.
W4W: With the amount of time that students have juggling work, family, all these other obligations, do you recommend that they just dive deep into the genre that they’re writing in and read as much of it as possible. Or, is it healthier as a writer to read across multiple genres?
JF: Multiple genres. When I first went to the conventions and stuff, they used to talk a lot– this is back in the day. They used to talk a lot about Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein. I couldn’t read any of them. It’s so stale. Asimov’s like wooden planks, I’m telling you. I couldn’t read half of that stuff.
What I did read were things in translation. You can’t believe the dark stuff that you could get from Japan, Tanizaki, and Kobo Abe, or South American writers, or Naguib Mahfouz from Egypt, all over the world.
That stuff is dynamite because it’s showing you a story that’s in an unusual setting. Characters may have a little bit different background and a little bit different motivations than you do. And you get to see so many different facets of that as you go through those books. That I found to be gold. That stuff’s gold– reading great works.
And when you want to be a dark fantasy writer or a fantasy writer or something like that, look, don’t just read the stuff that comes out in the fantasy section. You’ve got Kafka, Italo Calvino, Garcia Marquez. You’ve got Joyce Carol Oates. You’ve got just so many great writers out there that are in the “literary side” that are writing speculative and horror. Don’t let that pass you by. Some of those writers are terrific, and they’re turning out great stories.
There’s a book by Joyce Carol Oates called Wild Nights. It’s horror and spec fiction stories about early American writers. I’m telling you, there’s one in there about Hemingway where she really kicks his ass. They’re horrifying. They’re beautiful.
There’s one about Henry James in this hospital that’s just lurid and a horror story. I don’t like all her work, but I do love that book, and I love some of her other stuff, too, and dark stuff.
W4W: What’s your favorite of all your books? Do you have one?
JF: Whatever one I’m working on at the time. I just like what I’m doing. I like what I’m working on. I never go back and look at them. I think about them sometimes, but I never go back and read them. I’m busy doing the next thing. What’s the next thing? That’s the exciting thing right now and try to make that good.
W4W: One thing that you said that struck me was, a writer should be able to write anything. And you mentioned that you might be working on a novel and you’ll take a break because an editor will approach you for a story for a magazine or an anthology. So if you’re in the middle of working on a novel, and using your method of just kind of following where the story goes, how are you able to write to specifications for the requested writing like that?
JF: Well, here’s the thing with that stuff. It kind of seems contrary to what I do, because when they’re coming to you with an anthology idea, that’s a themed anthology, the way I approach that is, can I do something that’s going to be exciting to me?
You know Ellen Datlow. I do a lot of stories for her. She’s a horror editor, very well-known horror editor. I do a lot of work for her. And she came to me once with this idea for a horror thing that she wanted me to write a story about, young adult vampire story. And I thought to myself, that’s the beatest fucking thing I ever heard. But could you do a story that wouldn’t be beat? Could you do a story that would engage you and that would engage readers and so forth, and be something different? That’s the challenge. And that challenge is cool.
So if I’m doing a long book, I can always set that aside for a week and blow out one of these stories. And then I just let the story take over my imagination, and I go with it.
W4W: Where does revision fall in your process? How much time do you spend revising your work?
JF: Well, I revise all the way through as I’m writing. Every day, I get to it. I edit as I go and then start again that day. But I will tell people this, when I learned to find revision as exciting as the initial creation of the story, that’s when I started selling stuff. That’s when I really took off. When the revision became as exciting to me as writing the initial story, laying out the imagination, the vision I had, and then going back and tweaking it and shoring things up a little here or whatever, I reached a point where that became extremely exciting to me. And it still is. I love that part. So revision is nine-tenths of the battle after a while.
W4W: What do you think it was that made revision suddenly become interesting to you where before it hadn’t been?
JF: Because I was uptight about it. It’s like, here, I wrote this. It’s like the fucking Ten Commandments. It’s set in stone. And then I realized what freedom you have. I could do anything here. I have this thing laid out. I started to become the person who wrote it and the person looking over their shoulder at the story.
I was able to do that. And once you get into that head, that gives you power. It doesn’t diminish you to understand that there are critical things in the story that could be better, that could work better and might even turn it into a completely different story. And that’s very exciting. If you could do that, you’re on your way.
W4W: A lot of the students in our programs, when we talk about workshopping, they mention fears that somebody will try to take the story in a different direction than they want to take it. And my question is always, well, how do you know which way the story wants to go?
JF: What do you mean? Like somebody who reads it is going to come up with something different than what they want to say?
W4W: Yeah, or the feedback that they’ll receive from another writer would be pushing the story in the direction that the workshop wants to see it, rather than what the writer might want.
JF: Well, here’s the thing. Workshops can be very, very helpful. But you’re the writer, so it’s up to you. If you don’t like that, don’t do it. Don’t change it just because four people in the class said they think that’s the way it should go. If you don’t feel it, what good is it?
And not only that, but as I got older and wrote more– once I got out of school and I went through– I didn’t get an MFA or anything because they didn’t have them at the time. But I got a lot of good help when I was in school. But after I got out of it, I never went back and did much workshop stuff at all with anybody else.
I don’t do beta readers. I don’t give a damn. My beta reader is the editor. It’s between me and them. I don’t do a lot of that kind of stuff, sharing stuff with people. And that’s just me. I’m a crank.
W4W: Well, but you teach workshops.
JF: Oh, yeah, I teach them. Yeah, I teach them. But that’s what I tell people, too. If you don’t like what we’re saying here, you’re the last word. You’re the writer. You have that power. But you get a lot of good feedback, too. You have to keep your mind open.
This is one of my saving graces when I get into this. I was a clammer on the Great South Bay of Long Island when I finally ended up going to college. And I was dumb as a sack of shit. I knew it, too. That was my saving grace. And so I opened myself up. So I had some pretty good teachers, and I opened myself up to them.
And whatever they told me, I did it until I got to a point where I was good enough to make my own decisions about these things. And that doesn’t take that long. If you stick to it and you really work at it, that doesn’t take that long to get to that point. But yeah, you have to learn. No one jumps into this right off the bat and is a genius from the beginning. You’ve gotta work your way up.
W4W: You worked with the writer and critic John Gardner, who somebody mentioned, coincidentally, right at the outset of this chat–
JF: I saw that, yeah. Oh, wait, I just want to stop you for a minute. Whoever asked about CS Lewis, I had a ball reading those books to my kid. I’m not religious, but I did love those. Gardner, yeah, go ahead. I’m sorry.
W4W: No, that’s all right. I was just curious what you took away from him. How did he help you as a writer?
JF: Well, when I went there, I went from community college, and I had read Grendel my last year in the community college, and I really dug it. And I went to Binghamton, and he was there that year. First year, he was there. I couldn’t believe it. So I went to his office. This was a couple of days before the semester started. I said, I want to get in your class. He goes, that’s already been determined. Forget it. You’ve gotta try next semester.
So I left. I’m walking down the hall. He comes out the door and he says, hey. And I turn around. He goes, come back, I’ll give you a shot. He just put me in the class. I don’t know why or anything, but he put me in the class. I wasn’t a good typist, but I would rip pages out of a composition book and write stories on them in pencil, like these 30-page stories and then I’d slip them under his door.
I lived in a motel across the street from the school. One time in a blizzard, he called me up and he goes, come over. I’m looking at your story. It was at night, too. I don’t what he was doing there. But I go over, and he’d take a pen. He’d sit with me as long as it took to go through the story. And he would just crush it out and tell you, this is no good, and here’s why. And he’d tell you what the problems were as you went through.
And at the end, there were like five good sentences. These are good. Write another one.
And then eventually, he said to me one time, like, look, if you don’t type them up, I’m not reading them anymore. So that’s how I learned to type, to get him the stories.
But he was a great teacher, really great teacher. Sometimes I waited outside his office for, like, two hours to get in to see him. But when you got in there, he’d take two hours with you if the story deserved it. He was a great teacher.
He was the one who told me, what you want to affect in writing is the vivid and continuous dream. And what he meant by that was that when you dream, you believe stuff, like there’s a blue rhino chasing you down the street and you’re screaming and there’s sweat on you and you’re running, heavy breathing and stuff. What he was saying was, can you write a story that makes the reader believe it the way that they believe a dream? So for fantasy writers, this is gold, because no matter what you come up with in your mind, can you make the reader believe that it’s real and keep the dream going?
Don’t break the dream, the vivid and continuous dream.
He’s also the one who told me all that stuff about follow the character. To him, character was story. Follow the character. The character will take you to the story, eventually. You’ve got to follow the character, though, really pay attention to what they do. And then when you hit the story, you’ll know it, and then you take down what happens, who’s there, all this stuff around in the finest detail you can with the best craft at your disposal. And you’ll have a great story when you get done.
W4W: So after decades of writing, how has being a writer changed you personally? How has it shifted how you see or move through the world?
JF: I don’t know. It’s very hard for me to get a view from outside myself. But I still dig it. I sit here now, still today. I don’t have to do any of this. I’m retired. I got money coming in and stuff, and I have money from stuff I’ve written and everything. I don’t have to, but I love it. I still do it. It excites me, still.
I like working with young people. I just taught Clarion. And I teach another thing called the Writers Hotel. These are workshops that take place and stuff. And I teach those. That gives me a boost a lot of times. But the thing is, yeah, I still dig it. I don’t know. I’ve been doing it so long, it’s hard for me to say how it affects me though. I’m just too immersed in it, I guess.
You’ve gotta find your own way, what works for you. And don’t pay attention to what other people are doing and never run with the pack. When you run with the pack, you’re bound to be left behind.
Strike out on your own. Find your own path and go with it and have courage in the fact that you’re on a good path, that you’re going the right way. Be kind to other people you meet along the way. That’s what I would say.
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