12 Oct, 2012 Interview: kja by Sean R Moorhead

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12 Oct, 2012 Interview: kja by Sean R Moorhead

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http://port-haven.com/Interview%20-%20K ... erson.html


Interview: Kevin J. Anderson
By Sean R. Moorhead



I could introduce this interview with the usual journalistic chatter: "Kevin
J. Anderson is the internationally bestselling author of numerous novels in
the Star Wars and Dune settings, as well as his own Saga of Seven Suns—"

But you already know that, and if you didn't you could learn it through
Google. What's more important from my perspective is that Kevin is friendliest
author I've ever had the opportunity to converse with.

I've been lucky enough to converse with Kevin pretty regularly, because
he has acted as my mentor in writing since the time I was twelve years
old. At the risk of sounding trite and sycophantic, it was Kevin who taught
me, either verbally or by his example as an author, most of what I know
about writing: how to introduce exposition organically, how to give description
the stab of the physical, how to stage fight scenes and chase scenes...

Most of these truisms come with anecdotes. Once, as we talked over
Chicago-style deep-dish pizza, Kevin waxed eloquent about his philosophy
of background detail: "So you have the entire history of the Black Dragon
Inn worked out, and how the generals took it over as their headquarters
during the ancient war against the powers of darkness and how a demon
came down the chimney to assassinate them. It's enough to have your
character walk into the inn and see the claw marks on the hearth and have
a member of the wait staff say, 'Whatever you do, don't ask the innkeeper
about the time the demon came down the chimney during the war—once
he gets going on that story he'll never shut up!' That's enough for the
reader. Or if you're describing an alleyway, name the brands of the fast-food
wrappers, or say there's a single empty bottle of wine leaning against one
wall, and people will start to invent their own stories about how it got there."

It's delightful how readily Kevin constructs these examples. In that sense,
he is a born storyteller. But the most important thing he ever taught me
is that no matter how long your bibliography is (and Kevin's comprises well
over a hundred books if I count both hardcover and paperback releases),
what matters most is how you connect with people—in person or through
the stories you tell.

So here is Kevin J. Anderson on life, music, and storytelling.




SRM: Your latest novel, Clockwork Angels, is a collaboration with Rush’s
Neil Peart, and your debut novel, Resurrection Inc., was inspired in part
by the Rush album Grace Under Pressure. What role has music played for
you in the conceptual process?


KJA: Well, I’ve always listened to music as I write. A lot of times it’ll be
movie soundtracks while I’m editing—like Star Wars music when I’m writing
Star Wars novels. But the music of Rush in particular seems so full of ideas
that it makes stories appear in my head. I wanted to write those stories
that I experienced while listening to the music.

While I was writing my first novel, Resurrection Inc., I realized how closely
[Grace Under Pressure] was tied to what I was writing—and vice versa. I
would listen to a song and think “I can write a chapter about this”, but also
certain songs would reflect the story. Of course, that was just on my own.
It was only later, after reading [Resurrection Inc.], that Neil got in contact
with me, and we’ve been friends for more than twenty years.

I’ve had many scenes I’ve been able to take from music I listen to.
And now with Clockwork Angels, I can bring it all together.




SRM: So you’re into high-concept music—prog-rock and so on.

KJA: Yeah, Rush is the ultimate prog-rock band. Other influences were
Pink Floyd, Kansas, Styx, the Alan Parsons Project—the good old science
fiction music from when I was in high school—and Dream Theater and
Tool for more modern bands...




SRM: What form will Clockwork Angels take?

KJA: The album Clockwork Angels came out a few weeks ago and
immediately topped the music charts, which is gratifying to hear. The
songs tell the story of a young man’s journey though a steampunk world.

But the songs are snapshots, and I took that overall story in close
consultation with Neil and we developed it into a fully-fleshed story
instead of just, like, a movie trailer.

We wrote the novel, and it turned out extremely well (not that I’m unbiased).
The published book (in September) will have all the lyrics as well as
illustrations by Hugh Syme, who did the album art. It’s a beautiful book in
every way, because it’s beautiful to look at and I think it’s one of my best.




SRM: Of course, this isn’t your first multimedia project….
There was Roswell Six and your Terra Incognita trilogy.


KJA: Right, Roswell Six. For my Terra Incognita fantasy trilogy, we did two
rock albums that were based on the novels—by “we” I mean my wife Rebecca
and I. We worked with a record label and got a producer and got some of
my favorite rock stars: Steve Walsh from Kansas, James LaBrie from Dream
Theater, Michael Sadler from Saga, John Payne from Asia. We got David
Ragsdale, the violinist who plays the Kansas song “Dust in the Wind.”

I’ve always felt that music and fiction go hand in hand. They’re different
lenses of looking at a story, and I like putting them together so you can
get the full spectrum.




SRM: I imagine writing song lyrics is a different process from writing a
novel or a short story, since music tends to be more abstract.


KJA: It’s very different. In a song, the most important thing is to capture
the mood and evoke certain images, whereas in a novel or a short story,
obviously, you’re trying to tell the whole story. If you listen to a song, you
rarely get the big picture of a character. It’s some mood you’re trying to
evoke, like, for instance, “I’m so sad because my girlfriend left me”, which
is what it sometimes seems like most music is about.

But writing lyrics…I knew the overall album story I wanted to focus on,
and in writing the lyrics I would get the chorus, I’d get certain phrases,
and my wife would tear the lyrics apart and rewrite them, because when
I write, I’m just telling the story. And in a song you can’t do that. (You
don’t see terribly much Kevin J. Anderson poetry out there because I don’t
work well in that very dense format.)




SRM: Has your experience writing lyrics changed the way you approach prose?

KJA: Well, I think if you read Clockwork Angels the novel, its flavor is very
different from my other novels. It’s so distilled and crystallized in terms of
mood and themes. The lyrics of the album helped me really create a better novel.




SRM: There was period in the mid-Nineties, represented by Blindfold and
Darksaber, in which your prose become much more densely descriptive.
Were you consciously pushing your style in that direction?


KJA: I honestly couldn’t tell you. I keep writing and I’m not thinking about
any particular direction. You’re probably the first person to read it all through
in order and make that connection.

When I’m finished writing a novel I tend to clear it from my memory because
I’ve been over the manuscript so many times.

Although, I find it interesting to reread my old stuff—which I’m doing right
now in preparation for a collection of my old short stories. A writer is afraid
to read something old, and cringe and think, “Wow, I was a really bad writer.”
But, thankfully I haven’t had that experience yet.

But it’s very hard for a writer to read his own work objectively. I have to
leave that to other people.

Each project that I work on I try to see what I can do better, because if
I just phone it in, it becomes a job, and to me, I’m enjoying this so much
that I don’t want it to become routine.

For instance, the Dan Shamble, Zombie PI books…that’s the first time in
my career I’ve been able to go flat-out hilarious for page after page—and
I do have a decent sense of humor. But when I’m writing a huge Dune novel
or a grim Terra Incognita novel, there’s not much call for slapstick or puns
or gags. So I’m thrilled to be able to go somewhere different. Or I wrote a
lot of hard sci-fi, but Terra Incognita was epic fantasy. I just don’t want
to get in a rut.




SRM: In the past, you’ve expressed a certain amount of skepticism about
the “artsier” aspects of writing—watching sunsets for inspiration and so
forth. It sounds like, for you, the spiritual experience is in the doing—in
sitting down and producing.


KJA: Yes. And I do get inspired by watching sunsets and going through
the mountains—and hiking. In fact, I did two Fourteeners yesterday,
Mt Evans and Mt Bierstadt across a Class 3 ridge, which was miserable
because it was storming, but still an epic and gratifying climb.

The thing I’ve been more skeptical about is the more literary navel
contemplating and writers moaning about not being inspired, or
overanalyzing some metaphor or other, while forgetting to enjoy the
story for its own sake.

The writer’s job first and foremost is to tell a good story. There have been
many very Precious literary works—I want you to capitalize that P—that
just don’t have good stories.

The story is the underpinning of all fiction—story and characters. And if a
writer forgets that, I don’t care how fancy their writing is, how intense the
scenes are, how apt their metaphors are…they’ve failed as a writer if they
forget that foundation.




SRM: What, for you, defines a good story?

KJA: I like an interesting plot, interesting people, an interesting setting.
I want to be entertained and educated and inspired, all of that together…
that would make just about the greatest novel ever.




SRM: You’ve remarked that part of the reason you love Frank Herbert’s
Dune is that it works on so many different levels: as an adventure, as an
ecological parable, as an exercise in worldbuilding…


KJA: Well, one of the problems I see in some people who have a major
Point to make is that they let the point become dominant over the story.

I think the original Dune is such a good example of how to do it right
because it has such a terrific story and terrific characters and an amazing
exotic setting, that even if you don’t get the message—some people would
call that the medicine—you still have a great experience reading it.

When I’m doing my own stuff…I think Terra Incognita is a good example:
it’s a very intricate story, but I also have some fairly specific points about
religious intolerance and revenge and bloodshed, and that really meant a
lot to me, but if I just wrote a tract about “People shouldn’t be so intolerant”
then it would be a boring story. I think it’s better to get your message
across in a stealth manner, so it flows naturally from the story. You don’t
want two characters standing around having what amounts to a philosophical
debate where it’s rigged so that the author’s viewpoint wins.




SRM: And inevitably the character who agrees with the author is
intelligent and kind, and the character who disagrees is stupid and horrible….


KJA: Right.



SRM: Given your emphasis on storytelling as the primary goal of writing,
it’s interesting that you cite the late Ray Bradbury as one of your greatest
influences. A lot of his stories don’t have plots as such, just vivid settings.


KJA: Well, it’s a little hard to draw real generalizations for Bradbury
because he wrote hundreds of short stories. But a story like “The Foghorn”
or “A Sound of Thunder”, those have great plots and great ideas and a
great sense of wonder.

And yes, Bradbury did have a lot of nostalgia stories, snapshots of
childhood…and frankly, those were the ones I didn’t like so much. But just
the way he wrote… I grew up reading pulp sci-fi—Asimov and Arthur C.
Clarke—but Ray Bradbury gave science fiction a lyrical poetry. He changed
my perspective on science fiction. I would spend hours poring over
collections of his stories. And later on—it was on cassette tapes with
Bradbury reading his own stories—that brought them all back to me and I
realized how much he had influenced me. I think he was a terrific writer,
and he’s one of the ones that will stick around, because he had such great
ideas. I got a lot of my story ideas from him. He gave me a way of
reprocessing my childhood in the Midwest.




SRM: Which of your stories were inspired by Bradbury?

KJA: None that I’ll admit! But my Tucker’s Grove stories, which are being
published as a collection, are like Bradbury.




SRM: So for you, Bradbury gave science fiction more of a body, made it
more substantial?


KJA: He gave it more poetry—whereas Asimov and Heinlein were the nuts
and bolts and equations. Ray Bradbury put the music into science fiction.




SRM: Hey, you brought us back to the beginning!

KJA: Full circle.





...
When a brand knew urinal puck showed up in the bathroom of my studio, I knew what I had to do.
-AToE
D Pope
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Posts: 476
Joined: Tue Aug 17, 2010 12:16 pm

Re: October 12, 2012 Interview: Kevin J. Anderson Sean R. Moor

Post by D Pope »

I keep writing and I’m not thinking about any particular direction.
-teh hack
When a brand knew urinal puck showed up in the bathroom of my studio, I knew what I had to do.
-AToE
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