Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (85 page)

Did I read somewhere that you wanted to do a book in every genre?

What happened there was that that was a throwaway comment I made in an interview some years ago, which as you know the Internet has a tremendous capacity to never forget anything. People have been asking me about that ever since, but what happened was, and this again is not that uncommon, as I said that’s a kind of throwaway line and then people kept saying back to me. The more I thought about it the more I thought, “Yeah, that’s a really good idea. I should probably do that.” It was an off-the-cuff thing, but it’s an off-the-cuff thing that has a certain truth and resonance.

The thing is I am really very, very interested in genres. I find genres fascinating. I’m very interested in the way they work and the way they put things together. That includes genres that I don’t have any strong tradition with, genres that I have to come in from the outside and learn how they work. I don’t have a checklist in my pocket and I’m not going to rush it through. Especially those genres that I don’t know so much about… when I wrote
Iron Council,
I took quite a lot of time to read a lot of Westerns and work out how the Western works. Genres like Regency Romances that I have read, but I am not steeped in, I do like the idea of taking some time and taking them apart and working out how they work. And I thing that that idea of slowly over the course of career travelling through these different traditions and trying to be respectful to them but also do something, bring your own stuff to that table, I think is a really exciting idea.

Your fondness for the notion of planning seems to be very similar to your fondness for genre. The plan is there, then you deviate from it, or you don’t.

It’s an interesting formulation. At a conscious level I cannot say that I am fond of planning. I would say it’s more a question of my psychological model requiring planning. I take neither pleasure nor displeasure from plans. I just need them to proceed. Whereas with the genres, I take a lot of pleasure with the genres and in the way they work and their protocols and so on.

But I think you are probably onto something in the sense that I tend to be quite a structured thinker. I tend to find structures very useful in ways in terms of organizing my thoughts and the things I do and so on. That clearly has some ramifications in both those fields. It’s not something that would have occurred to me, but I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, you’re probably onto something.

Do you ever experiment with
not
being structured at any point in the process? Does being structured become a limitation, or is it always a strength?

I think it varies writer to writer. There are certainly writers for whom being overly structured would not be a strength at all. I don’t doubt that one could probably make a strong claim that some of the things… The people that don’t like my stuff might say that some of the problem with it stem from this kind of care, some would say neurosis, about this sort of planning. It’s very difficult to say because it’s so kind of integral to my mental model that thinking outside of it is to kind of think in terms of a different me. I have on a couple of occasions tried writing things which don’t have a structure and don’t have a plan in mind. What I can do, I think, reasonably well, I think I can write good sort of very short, mood pieces, maybe a page long. These are not plot things. These are almost sort of prose poems. Those, I think, work very well, for me anyway. I like both. That can kind of tap into certain intensity, but for anything that’s longer that has a narrative, I just get a bit lost without a plan.

It’s also the case that having a plan and a structure does
not
negate the intensity. I think sometimes there is an anxiety that if you plan too much you will end up with something quite bloodless and that doesn’t feel urgent. I am sure that may be true for some people. I don’t feel it to myself at all. They’re two separate axes. I can very, very rigorously plan something over a couple of weeks and then I actually sit down to write it, I am rushing with that kind of buzz, that sort of high, just as much as if it had just spilled out of the pen there and then.

What is the secret to capturing mood so intensely?

I don’t know. This is the kind of thing that writers agonize over for centuries. I suspect that it’s something to do with a relatively unmediated sense presence. All these things that you do when you are trying to write something that’s very evocative of scene and you kind of sit back and close your eyes, you know it may look a bit ridiculous sometimes, but it’s perfectly reasonable thing to do. Writing and invoking images and that sort of thing are… You know, there is no division between the mind and the body, they are bodily acts. Putting yourself into a state of mind where you are very reflective of those moments may very well involve putting your body in certain place. This is why some writers write very brilliantly on drugs, which I don’t as it happens, it’s not my interest.

Certainly, a certain kind of very repetitive music, and a certain kind of close intensity can be very evocative. For me, I find often the most powerful writing that I think I do in terms of that moment, that kind of presence in a moment, is often very late at night when very few other people are awake and I am looking out of the window. I always work looking out the window. I am not someone who has my desk facing a wall. I am looking at the city and the lights are on in the windows. There is this great sense of being in a carapace of light. That sort of strangely dream-like moment, I think what you are trying to do when you get that kind of intensity is that you are trying to translate a sense that is basically like a dream in a waking moment. Anything you can do physically or mentally that gets you closer to that experience is probably good.

Is it harder in a non-urban setting to get into this state of mind?

I wouldn’t want to generalize it.
I
tend to get into it in an urban setting. That’s probably because I tend to
be
in an urban setting. I know perfectly well that some people find being in the wilderness, being in the woods, intensely hypnotic, hallucinatory, and intense. Certainly, I have written things that I love and that I think do touch that not in urban setting. I wouldn’t want to generalize that. It is the case, as I say, that I tend to do it in an urban setting, but that says more about me and about the projects that I’m interested in than it says about the countryside versus the city in general.

Railsea
is your second young adult novel. What does this category require of you? Does it challenge you in different ways than, say, a more intricate book like
Embassytown
?

I don’t like the category of young adult very much. I think it’s not terribly helpful. It’s basically a marketing category. I am not having a go at marketers here. I work with marketers. They have to do their job. I understand that. These categories may be useful in marketing terms, but what it’s not, I think, is a psychological category or an aesthetic category or philosophical category or anything like that. It’s not my job to worry about marketing, so for that reason, I don’t particularly set much store by the category of Young Adult.

I am very aware that when I read books as a child—I would say as a child, not as a young adult–there was a different kind of intensity that I fell into. No matter how much I love a book now, I don’t read it in the same way, with that same kind of absolutely compulsive inhabiting of the book in a way that I did when I was a kid. And then there’s a shift. I think what Young Adult tends to mean is this blurry line, a very, very, very blurry line between that and “adult” book. I think essentially for me it’s simply question of not worrying about it. I don’t really care. What I always do, and I think probably a lot of writers would say this, you’re writing for yourself and you’re writing for yourself at a particular time in your life. Quite early on when I was planning
Railsea,
I realized that I was writing for my own, I would say roughly twelve-ish, maybe thirteen-year-old self. That doesn’t preclude reading it also when I am older, and it doesn’t preclude reading it when I am younger. But that was who I think I had in mind when I was doing the writing.

What does it mean? For me, it’s a question of the kind of voice that transports and transported me when I was that age, which doesn’t mean dumbing down or anything like that. You don’t have to do those at all. For me, because of the kind of books that I loved, it means a certain kind of relationship to language, a certain more kind of overtly playful relationships. I use things like punts, which I wouldn’t tend to use in a book written for an older me. It means a certain kind of playfulness about the structure and shape of the novel, so that the whole book is predicated on a silly joke about
Moby-Dick
. It’s a joke that’s hopefully kind of fun, but it’s the kind of thing that I wouldn’t feel secure writing with my thirty-year-old in mind.

That doesn’t mean that my thirty-year-old self wouldn’t read it and enjoy it, it just means that’s not who I am writing for in that moment. Different writers can do this very differently. For me, things like those jokes, those puns, that kind of playfulness about language tend to be the kind of things that get freed up. I keep repeating the word playfulness because that’s the fundamental difference that I am aware of. I know when my British publisher has published this book, and they haven’t called it a YA novel, it’s a “story for readers of all ages.” On one hand, that’s obviously a piece of marketing because they don’t want anyone to feel they shouldn’t buy it. And I am grateful to them for that, but I do honestly much prefer that as a description because that’s how it feels in my head. It feels like
Un Lun Dun
. I know some adults read and enjoyed
Un Lun Dun
. I am delighted by that. We can all read and enjoy books for younger readers. But that felt very much like a book for younger readers for me.
Railsea
feels more like a book is written for “readers of all ages.”

Is there anything that you read now or any particular writer now who gives you a taste of that compulsive inhabiting of a book like you experienced when you were younger? I keep thinking of drug-users trying to recapture that first high. Can we get that back? Can we still find that buzz?

Some people may be able to. I suspect not. I suspect that that particular kind of buzz is absolutely, fundamentally a function of reading as a young reader who doesn’t have a lot of, relatively speaking, a lot of reading under their belt and who doesn’t have a lot of
life
under their belt. But again, that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel a trace all the time. I think we
do
feel a trace of it. It’s one of the many things that we’re constantly hankering for. If there are readers who really do fall into books in the same way they did when they were eight, then I am envious of them. You also have certain new things when you read as an adult. It’s not all a loss. You gain some things, too. One of the things you gain as an adult is that every book you read, you are reading it through a matrix, through the kind of warp and weft of all the other books you’ve read and that number grows and grows and grows, so every book becomes more and more entangledly intertextual. That’s a lovely thing. You lose and you gain. There is definitely a melancholy to it, I freely admit that, but melancholy is not the worst thing. That hankering itself gives you a certain drive to read, which is good.

Are there any books that you inhabited when you were younger that changed you in a significant way? Books that you keep visiting in your mind?

Oh my god, so many! Absolutely heaps, and often when I am asked to list them, one forgets them because they are so close up. It’s like that thing when you look for your glasses, and you are wearing them. The paradox is a lot of the books that are most embedded in me are books that I sometimes forget to mention, which is a terrible injustice. The short answer is yes, loads. I mean there is no hard division between children’s books and adult books. I would say book that did that for me, hugely, was
The Anubis Gates
by Tim Powers, which is not a children’s book. It’s an adult book, but I read it when I was probably eleven. It absolutely took up residence in my head. It’s one of the key texts in my head.

What was it about
The Anubis Gates
that captured you?

It’s always very difficult to sort of explain one’s affective reaction. I love the intricacy—and I get back to your structure point, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time—I loved the intricacy of the time-travel narrative. I love the way that it appeared to be exploding into this chaos, but then everything came together with this extraordinary neatness, this extraordinary kind of clicking into place. I thought that was beautiful. I loved the monsters. I loved the time-shifting visions of London. It’s magic, but it’s systematized magic. I passionately love that book. It’s difficult for me to host back there and explain why, but that’s a kind of groping towards it.

Lastly, what are you working on now?

I am doing a novel, which I will not say too much about because I am always very superstitious about talking about work in progress. I am very much looking forward to doing some more short stories. I love writing short stories, although I am not a very quick writer. I write one every so often, but I love them when I do. I’d also like to do some more nonfiction, which I haven’t done for a while. I really enjoy writing nonfiction. Other than that, I am doing a regular comic now for DC [
Dial H For Hero
]. That is something I would love to keep doing. That kind of depends on people continuing to buy and read it.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones
is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for
Clarkesworld Magazine
and a frequent contributor to
Kobold Quarterly
and
Booklifenow.com.
He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.