Writercon Guest Debra Doyle
While we're all (impatiently) waiting for July, we decided to give you a peek behind the curtain on what you can expect at this year's Writercon. We'll be spotlighting programming and giving you some inside information on our fabulous guests. This week Debra Doyle has stepped up to the plate and talks about fandom, writing with one's spouse and Martha's Vineyard. Enjoy!
Q. When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
A. I started wanting to be a writer very early, at about the same time that I realized that books were things made by people, and not just the naturally occurring fruit of the fiction tree. I wrote a lot of really awful stories and poetry in junior high and high school -- the kind of thing that the term "juvenilia" was invented to cover, and thank God this was before the internet and the permanent archiving of everything, because if I'm lucky all of it got thrown out years ago -- and finished my first book-shaped object during the summer between high school and college. It pretty much stank on ice, but I remember it fondly nonetheless, because I finished it and learned a lot about writing in the process. (Among other things, I learned that it's a very bad idea to set an important action sequence in a cave, or in any other place without natural or artificial light. Your characters will spend far too much time fumbling with lanterns and lamps and candles, and you'll have to keep track of who's holding which and what gets dropped when and what happens when all the lights go out. I eventually gave up and -- I told you the story stank on ice -- resorted to lighting the whole scene with magically glowing rocks. I would have been better off revising the plot to get rid of the cave entirely, but I didn't know that then.)
Q. Do you have a writing routine? If so, please share!
A. I'm not nearly as organized as I ought to be. But I do my best if I can generate new material in the late evening, when my internal editor/critic is more easily lulled into acquiescence, and revise old material in the morning, when the editor/critic is wide awake and eager to be on the job.
Q. You’re well known for your Circle of Magic and Mageworlds series, what was your inspiration for those worlds?
A. The Circle of Magic series (not to be confused with Tamora Pierce's excellent series with the same name) was inspired by my fondness for the Middle Ages and for medieval literature, especially the Middle English metrical romances and the ballad tradition. The Mageworlds stories have a more . . . complex . . . origin, and their fanfic roots are undoubtedly visible to anyone who looks closely, or who happens to own certain hardcopy fanzines from the late 1980s.
At the time the very earliest versions of what turned into parts of the first novel were being written, Jim Macdonald and I were living in Panamá, where he was assigned to Rodman Naval Station, and I was going quietly nuts from boredom. This was before the commercial internet, and just barely after the beginning of the personal computer era (the rocks had finished cooling, but we hadn't made it all the way up to single-celled organisms yet); there was one importer of English-language books in the entire country, which meant that no matter where you went you had the same limited selection; and for television you had your choice of the local stations -- lots of telenovelas -- or the Army's Southern Command Network, which showed (or so it seemed at the time) the most forgettable shows from a decade before, interspersed with public-service non-commercials. I turned to writing fanfic more or less in self-defense.
Eventually, it dawned on me and Macdonald* that not only had we accumulated enough bits and pieces of story to make up something of novel length, we also had something which could feasibly have its serial numbers filed off and -- with the help of a complete backstory transplant -- be made into something original. (A big warning sign that you're wandering out of fanfic and into something else: you take a long hard look at your body of work and notice that you're mostly telling stories about second-or-third generation OCs, with the main canonical characters only showing up now and then for cameo appearances.) We spent the next year or so, when we weren't working on other stuff, in combining, intercutting, expanding, reworking, and generally slicing and dicing the original text until it was something fit to submit and, eventually, sell.
*Yes, we mostly call each other by our last names. We were doing it long before Mulder and Scully stole the idea.
Q. What are some of the challenges and rewards of co-writing with your husband, James Macdonald?
A. The big advantage to having a co-author is that you've got somebody else to do all the difficult parts. We're fortunate in that we don't agree on which parts are the difficult ones.
The challenge? Writing with someone is a peculiarly intimate act; you're providing the other person with a detailed map of all the locked rooms and dark places of your psyche, and handing them a key to all the doors. Macdonald and I had been married for ten years, and had two kids, before we ever mustered up enough nerve to play "I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours" with our fiction.
Q. You are also renowned as a instructor at the Viable Paradise Writers’ Workshop. What do you enjoy most about teaching workshops? What are the biggest challenges?
A. The most enjoyable thing about teaching at a writer's workshop? The fact that everybody I'm teaching actually wants to be there, and is actually interested in doing the work, and that the things I'm teaching are actually things I'm good at and interested in. (I have a doctorate in English -- Old and Middle English, to be specific, with a side order of Old Icelandic. The closest I ever got to teaching in my specialty was a one-semester course once in Modern Grammar, and that was a pick-up gig because the original instructor was taking a year off to write her dissertation. Mostly, it was freshman comp and freshman comp and still more freshman comp, and a couple of freshman courses in Modern Short Fiction. And I feel about Modern Short Fiction pretty much the way you'd expect a medievalist and a genre fan to feel. Small wonder that I gave it up and turned into yet another of the sf and fantasy field's renegade medievalists.)
The challenges? Well, it's fairly unnerving to have people expecting you to impart some kind of secret wisdom, when in fact all you can really tell them is, "Hey, these are things that have worked for me. Maybe they'll work for you."
Viable Paradise is a lot of fun, regardless. Martha's Vineyard is a great place to spend a week talking about writing and working on writing and hanging out 24/7 (if you count time spent asleep in shared accommodations) with other writers. It also has the world's best clam shack, and jellyfish that glow in the dark. This has been a shameless plug.
Q. What would you consider your greatest professional achievement?
A. Something that I haven't written yet, I hope; I'd hate to think that my glory days, such as they were, are all behind me.
Q. What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given?
Get rid of all the adverbs you can.
(The most practical piece of advice didn't have anything to do with writing at all. It was in Rita Mae Brown's excellent book on writing, Starting from Scratch, in which she recommends that if you have to talk with a banker about a loan, bring your novel contracts in with you. Following her advice enabled us to get a mortgage when we needed one.)
Q. What was you first fandom?
A. My first fandom was Star Trek: TOS. I used to trade handwritten stories with two or three of my friends in high school (this was not only before the internet; for me this was before fanzines and even before typewriters.) I can state without reservation that all of those stories pretty much sucked. Then there was a long fandomless stretch during college and into the start of graduate school, right up to the point where I discovered sf fandom and Star Trek fanzines both in the same year.
Q. What has been your most rewarding fandom experience?
A. It's hard to pick out a peak experience. I like the opportunities fandom -- especially internet fandom -- gives for making connections with people. The slow snailmail version of the fandom phenomenon was part of what staved off the sense of isolation and kept me sane during our time in Panamá.
Q.What would you now consider “your” fandom?
Supernatural, no question. I'm watching several shows (Life, Fringe, Dollhouse, and Burn Notice, to name a few), but Supernatural is the only one that makes me want to write fanfic.
Q. What prompted you to accept the invitation to Writercon?
A. The con sounded like a great deal of fun -- I'd read accounts of previous Writercons, and the posters all sounded like they were having a wonderful time -- and I like to travel.
Debra Doyle, Ph.D writes science fiction, fantasy and mystery stories, many with her husband James Macdonald. Their most recent joint works include Land of Mist and Snow, an alternate-historical naval fantasy set in the Civil War, (Eos, December 2006), and the short story "Philologos: or, A Murder in Bistrita" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 2008.) A full bibliography is available on their web page. Dr. Doyle also is well known as an instructor with her husband at the Viable Paradise Writers' Workshop, an annual science fiction and fantasy writers' workshop held each autumn on Martha's Vineyard.
Q. When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
A. I started wanting to be a writer very early, at about the same time that I realized that books were things made by people, and not just the naturally occurring fruit of the fiction tree. I wrote a lot of really awful stories and poetry in junior high and high school -- the kind of thing that the term "juvenilia" was invented to cover, and thank God this was before the internet and the permanent archiving of everything, because if I'm lucky all of it got thrown out years ago -- and finished my first book-shaped object during the summer between high school and college. It pretty much stank on ice, but I remember it fondly nonetheless, because I finished it and learned a lot about writing in the process. (Among other things, I learned that it's a very bad idea to set an important action sequence in a cave, or in any other place without natural or artificial light. Your characters will spend far too much time fumbling with lanterns and lamps and candles, and you'll have to keep track of who's holding which and what gets dropped when and what happens when all the lights go out. I eventually gave up and -- I told you the story stank on ice -- resorted to lighting the whole scene with magically glowing rocks. I would have been better off revising the plot to get rid of the cave entirely, but I didn't know that then.)
Q. Do you have a writing routine? If so, please share!
A. I'm not nearly as organized as I ought to be. But I do my best if I can generate new material in the late evening, when my internal editor/critic is more easily lulled into acquiescence, and revise old material in the morning, when the editor/critic is wide awake and eager to be on the job.
Q. You’re well known for your Circle of Magic and Mageworlds series, what was your inspiration for those worlds?
A. The Circle of Magic series (not to be confused with Tamora Pierce's excellent series with the same name) was inspired by my fondness for the Middle Ages and for medieval literature, especially the Middle English metrical romances and the ballad tradition. The Mageworlds stories have a more . . . complex . . . origin, and their fanfic roots are undoubtedly visible to anyone who looks closely, or who happens to own certain hardcopy fanzines from the late 1980s.
At the time the very earliest versions of what turned into parts of the first novel were being written, Jim Macdonald and I were living in Panamá, where he was assigned to Rodman Naval Station, and I was going quietly nuts from boredom. This was before the commercial internet, and just barely after the beginning of the personal computer era (the rocks had finished cooling, but we hadn't made it all the way up to single-celled organisms yet); there was one importer of English-language books in the entire country, which meant that no matter where you went you had the same limited selection; and for television you had your choice of the local stations -- lots of telenovelas -- or the Army's Southern Command Network, which showed (or so it seemed at the time) the most forgettable shows from a decade before, interspersed with public-service non-commercials. I turned to writing fanfic more or less in self-defense.
Eventually, it dawned on me and Macdonald* that not only had we accumulated enough bits and pieces of story to make up something of novel length, we also had something which could feasibly have its serial numbers filed off and -- with the help of a complete backstory transplant -- be made into something original. (A big warning sign that you're wandering out of fanfic and into something else: you take a long hard look at your body of work and notice that you're mostly telling stories about second-or-third generation OCs, with the main canonical characters only showing up now and then for cameo appearances.) We spent the next year or so, when we weren't working on other stuff, in combining, intercutting, expanding, reworking, and generally slicing and dicing the original text until it was something fit to submit and, eventually, sell.
*Yes, we mostly call each other by our last names. We were doing it long before Mulder and Scully stole the idea.
Q. What are some of the challenges and rewards of co-writing with your husband, James Macdonald?
A. The big advantage to having a co-author is that you've got somebody else to do all the difficult parts. We're fortunate in that we don't agree on which parts are the difficult ones.
The challenge? Writing with someone is a peculiarly intimate act; you're providing the other person with a detailed map of all the locked rooms and dark places of your psyche, and handing them a key to all the doors. Macdonald and I had been married for ten years, and had two kids, before we ever mustered up enough nerve to play "I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours" with our fiction.
Q. You are also renowned as a instructor at the Viable Paradise Writers’ Workshop. What do you enjoy most about teaching workshops? What are the biggest challenges?
A. The most enjoyable thing about teaching at a writer's workshop? The fact that everybody I'm teaching actually wants to be there, and is actually interested in doing the work, and that the things I'm teaching are actually things I'm good at and interested in. (I have a doctorate in English -- Old and Middle English, to be specific, with a side order of Old Icelandic. The closest I ever got to teaching in my specialty was a one-semester course once in Modern Grammar, and that was a pick-up gig because the original instructor was taking a year off to write her dissertation. Mostly, it was freshman comp and freshman comp and still more freshman comp, and a couple of freshman courses in Modern Short Fiction. And I feel about Modern Short Fiction pretty much the way you'd expect a medievalist and a genre fan to feel. Small wonder that I gave it up and turned into yet another of the sf and fantasy field's renegade medievalists.)
The challenges? Well, it's fairly unnerving to have people expecting you to impart some kind of secret wisdom, when in fact all you can really tell them is, "Hey, these are things that have worked for me. Maybe they'll work for you."
Viable Paradise is a lot of fun, regardless. Martha's Vineyard is a great place to spend a week talking about writing and working on writing and hanging out 24/7 (if you count time spent asleep in shared accommodations) with other writers. It also has the world's best clam shack, and jellyfish that glow in the dark. This has been a shameless plug.
Q. What would you consider your greatest professional achievement?
A. Something that I haven't written yet, I hope; I'd hate to think that my glory days, such as they were, are all behind me.
Q. What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given?
Get rid of all the adverbs you can.
(The most practical piece of advice didn't have anything to do with writing at all. It was in Rita Mae Brown's excellent book on writing, Starting from Scratch, in which she recommends that if you have to talk with a banker about a loan, bring your novel contracts in with you. Following her advice enabled us to get a mortgage when we needed one.)
Q. What was you first fandom?
A. My first fandom was Star Trek: TOS. I used to trade handwritten stories with two or three of my friends in high school (this was not only before the internet; for me this was before fanzines and even before typewriters.) I can state without reservation that all of those stories pretty much sucked. Then there was a long fandomless stretch during college and into the start of graduate school, right up to the point where I discovered sf fandom and Star Trek fanzines both in the same year.
Q. What has been your most rewarding fandom experience?
A. It's hard to pick out a peak experience. I like the opportunities fandom -- especially internet fandom -- gives for making connections with people. The slow snailmail version of the fandom phenomenon was part of what staved off the sense of isolation and kept me sane during our time in Panamá.
Q.What would you now consider “your” fandom?
Supernatural, no question. I'm watching several shows (Life, Fringe, Dollhouse, and Burn Notice, to name a few), but Supernatural is the only one that makes me want to write fanfic.
Q. What prompted you to accept the invitation to Writercon?
A. The con sounded like a great deal of fun -- I'd read accounts of previous Writercons, and the posters all sounded like they were having a wonderful time -- and I like to travel.
Debra Doyle, Ph.D writes science fiction, fantasy and mystery stories, many with her husband James Macdonald. Their most recent joint works include Land of Mist and Snow, an alternate-historical naval fantasy set in the Civil War, (Eos, December 2006), and the short story "Philologos: or, A Murder in Bistrita" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 2008.) A full bibliography is available on their web page. Dr. Doyle also is well known as an instructor with her husband at the Viable Paradise Writers' Workshop, an annual science fiction and fantasy writers' workshop held each autumn on Martha's Vineyard.