Kirby Michael Wright On Creative Non-Fiction

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today's guest for the WHAT is Kirby Michael Wright, who was born and raised in Honolulu and spent summers with his part-Hawaiian grandma on Moloka'i. He attended Punahou School on Oahu, where he once arm-wrestled Barrack Obama for a cigarette. He received his BA in English Literature from the University of California, San Diego. Anne Rice accepted him into the Creative Writing Program at San Francisco State University, where he was the first student in the history of the school to sweep the poetry awards. Wright received the 2018 Redwood Empire Mensa Award for Creative Nonfiction. His stories and stand-alone chapters have been published in over 200 literary journals and magazines worldwide.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

I must admit most of my characters have been based on my immediate family. Now that I’m concentrating on Creative Nonfiction, I keep the names the same—that allows me to really dig into their personalities. Why? Because, to me, real names mean it’s no longer fiction and helps me mine the real stuff. I’m into exploring interior worlds to find out what makes my family tick. Perhaps, through this process, I’m trying to figure myself out as well.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I don’t have to invent much since I’m writing about what really happened. Sometimes I feel like a court reporter as the memories of family pop into my head. One on the techniques that really works for me is creating dialogue blocks between two or more characters and allowing them the freedom to ramble on. From there I edit out the weaker lines and mix in narration, gesture, etc. Dialogue is such a great place to start for writers because it helps you focus on the nuances of character by the way they deliver lines. I’ve been writing lots of pidgin English lately, the creole-type language spoken by locals in Hawaii. What’s interesting about that is different variations of pidgin English are spoken depending on which island you’re on.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

This may sound crazy, but I write the ending first. That way I have the Destination Shore in mind before I drop the oars in the water in Chapter One. I allow the chapters to unfold and almost never change plot points. In THE QUEEN OF MOLOKA’I, I did rearrange chapters to kill the slower pace of the rural setting. This was done through Julia’s flashback to her brief affair with the Englishman at the Moana Hotel in Waikiki. I love mixing rural with city, and that setting conflict helps me enter the mindset of my grandmother when she was a wild teen running the streets of Honolulu.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

Julia Wright, my grandm,a was a firecracker so there’s no lack of material. My 300-page book covers only four years of her life! I do have to exercise my memory to remember the stories she told me about her life when I spent summers with her on her Moloka’i horse ranch. I’ve experimented with third person and first in various stories and both seem to work. However, when I write about Julia before I was born, that’s when I keep it third person.

I always get fresh ideas whenever I go overseas to lecture. But what comes out of that is usually poetry and flash (micro fiction). I wrote an entire book of verse in three weeks during my recent sojourn to Helsinki, the Finnish Archipelago, and Stockholm. In Stockholm, I stayed near the secret recording studio of ABBA.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

I have several projects on the backburner at any given time, but must focus on a single project to cross the finish line. Otherwise, I’d spend my days spinning in circles. When the other projects try seducing me to start them, I have to ignore their wanton wails. “In due time,” I tell them, “you’re time will come.”

I have lots of cats (check my Instagram) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

I’m with you! I have three cats and all of them are Senior Citizens. It’s reassuring to have company when I’m writing, especially since they’re fairly quiet. My cats calm me down too when I’m feeling stressed, that is, when they’re not whining for snacks or regular meals. Hurray for felines!

Victoria Lee On Moving Forward After Your Debut

Welcome to the SNOB (Second Novel Ominipresent Blues). Whether you’re under contract or trying to snag another deal, you’re a professional now, with the pressures of a published novelist compounded with the still-present nagging self-doubt of the noobie.

Today's guest for the SNOB is Victoria Lee author of The Fever King. She’s been a state finalist competitive pianist, a hitchhiker, a pizza connoisseur, an EMT, an expat in China and Sweden, and a science doctoral student.

Is it hard to leave behind the first novel and focus on the second?

I’m working on drafting two different books right now: one is a contracted sequel to my debut, The Fever King. The other is an unrelated fantasy novel that I started writing while I was on submission with The Fever King. And for both books, I’d say yes—it’s been really hard to move on from my first book to focus on writing new material, but for very different reasons.

With the sequel, there’s a fear that it won’t be as good as the first book. I wrote The Fever King in just two months, but then I spent over two years revising. I don’t have nearly that much time on my deadline for book 2! I’m worried that whatever readers love about the first book won’t come through in the sequel, and people will end up disappointed. And…on a more recent timescale, that the same might happen with my editor. So there’s a lot of self-imposed pressure on the sequel for it to feel like a good follow-up to the first book, to tie up all the loose threads and feel like the natural and inevitable conclusion to the story.

With the new book, the pressures are very different.

At what point do you start diverting your energies from promoting your debut and writing / polishing / editing your second?

There’s a big chunk of time between sending off your edits and needing to begin promotion. Usually promotion shouldn’t start in earnest until six months before your publication date—and really, more like three. I tried to use that chunk of time to get a large amount done on The Fever King’s contracted sequel. But…promoting your debut is fun. At least, I think so. I constantly had to distract myself from planning promo and focus instead on actually writing the second book! I also had the pressure of a new grad school semester beginning, and studying for my Ph.D. comprehensive exams, so I was pretty motivated to get as much done on the sequel as possible before I got too sucked into grad school again. It’s still a process, though. One thing I find helpful is scheduling out time during my day for both tasks. I’ll block a few hours for preparing promo materials, then another few hours for writing book 2, and so on.

Your first book landed an agent and an editor, and hopefully some fans. Who are you writing the second one for? Them, or yourself?

As I’m writing the sequel, I’m thinking of my potential readers. And of myself. I have a definite vision of the “ideal reader” in my head—the kind of reader I think will most like my books, who my books will speak to. And that ideal reader is a whole lot like my own younger self. I want to write the book that will satisfy young, creative, slightly-pessimistic yet idealistic queer Jewish teens hoping to see themselves represented in SFF. I want to write a conclusion to this series that will make any reader who fell in love with the first book feel like the second book didn’t let them down. But for myself—I want to spend more time with these characters. And in a lot of ways, I feel like I have to do the characters justice, too. I’ve fallen in love with them. It’s hopeless.

Is there a new balance of time management to address once you’re a professional author?

Oh, definitely. Not just between promoting your debut and working on a sequel, but planning the book that comes after that. And the one after that. I have way too many ideas I want to write, and it can get frustrating to know I have to wait to get to them. …Especially now that I know how much editing effort is involved in polishing a book for publication.

I was already pretty good at time management; it was a skill I learned in grad school. I just had to apply it to a new domain, too. I’m actually one of those weird people who functions more efficiently when super busy? I like to have as little free time as possible. Free time breeds procrastination, for me. But if I know that this is the only hour today I’ll be able to work on my book, then dammit, I’m gonna get so much done on that book in an hour.

What did you do differently the second time around, with the perspective of a published author?

I outlined more.

I wrote my debut as a “connect-the-dots” writer—I had a few major milestones I needed to hit, but then I just kind of discovery-wrote between them. Now, I have more than just a few milestones planned out. I still discovery write, sort of, but the way it works now is that I’ll religiously plan in detail every next 10,000 words. What comes after those 10k is still undecided until after I reach the next milestone, but I’ve learned that I definitely need to at least plan 10k in advance to avoid rambling on for pages with character introspection that—while fascinating to me—proooobably doesn’t propel the story forward.

I also cut myself a lot more slack in drafting.  I’ve learned this book will likely go through ten drafts and at least two rewrites before it’s published, so, no need to obsess over line-level prose. I’m just trying to get the story down. The nuts and bolts, even—right now my draft pacing is all off. It’s way too fast. But I’ll get the story skeleton on paper, and I can expand it later, once I’ve established what bits of the character arcs and subplots are really integral to the story and need to be fleshed out.

Novelist Claire Eliza Bartlett on Finding Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

Today's guest for the WHAT is Claire Bartlett, whose debut We Rule the Night releases April 2.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

My origin came from a song, which turned into a research project, which turned into the novel. In late 2013 a friend gave me a spare ticket to a metal concert, and I listened to some of the band’s newer music before going. The song that caught my ear was called Night Witches, and was based on the true story of the world’s first all-female combat regiment. Several memoirs and nonfiction books later, I knew I had a novel on my hands.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I knew there were certain episodes in the story of the Night Witches that I wanted to include, so as I built on my themes of feminism and strong female friendship, and sketched out those scenes in my own world (which is historically based, but a fantasy setting). As I went I added scenes that I knew would be key for the development for the novel and my main characters. When I ran out of my key scenes, I finally made an outline to figure out which scenes I was missing.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Very early on I toyed with the idea of including a love interest, and his side of the war from the enemy’s perspective - but I quickly realized that not only did I want to focus on female friendship instead, but writing a third point of view would make the novel way too long!

Once I’d cleared him out of the way, things went pretty much the way I expected them to.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I probably read something every day where I think, ‘this would make a good novel.’ Sometimes I think it would make a good novel by someone else, but not by me. But sometimes an idea builds on a concept that’s lying fallow in my brain, and sometimes it goes into my ‘story hub,’ a Scrivener document that I have for any characters, settings, plots or concepts that I don’t have space for yet, but I don’t want to forget. I won’t say that my story hub is absolutely bursting with ideas, but I’m not going to run out of material any time soon!

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

Ooh, that’s a good question. For my next book, I’ve been slinging ideas at my agent. We talk about the market, where I am as a writer, and how future work might tie in with my existing work to try and figure out where to go next. Some ideas go back into percolation, and some we explore further together. Otherwise, it’s the capriciousness of my brain.

I also have been experimenting with writing short stories. I have a goal of writing 200 words on a short story every day - just to make sure I’m still paying attention and moving forward on it. Those 200 words feel like virtually nothing when I sit down to do them, but pretty quickly they add up!

I have a lot of cats (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

I would love a writing buddy in the form of a furry animal. My dream animal right now is a wire-haired dachshund, but negotiations with the husband aren’t getting very far! (Husbands make terribly distracting writing buddies, by the way). Perhaps a cat is in the near future, but for now I’m writing solo.