Speaking of the Fantastic III by Darrell Schweitzer

Author:Darrell Schweitzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: George R. R. Martin, Joe Haldeman, Charles Stross, Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2012-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

GREGORY FROST

Q: When you started writing, eons ago, you didn’t think you were going to make a living at it, did you?

Frost: No, and I don’t think I have. When I started out I think I was just desperate to get into print. I wasn’t even thinking about moving from that phase into the possibility of making any sort of a living doing it. It was just, Please, somebody publish my story. That was really all I was thinking about at the beginning. Breaking into print. Long-term notions of a career were at best nebulous.

Q: That’s probably what most of us experience. Don’t you think that writing is more of a compulsion than get-rich-quick scheme?

Frost: Yes. I’ve been teaching fiction now for twenty-some years—adults, high-school kids, college students—and I think, watching all the people who have gone through the various classes with me and knowing all the writers that I know, that it’s some form of addiction, or—dare I say?—mental illness. I can’t advocate doing this for a lot of people. It’s a kind of obsession. You can’t help yourself.

I went through a really bad patch in the late ’80s and early ’90s and I tried repeatedly to throw in the towel and say, “I’m going to do something else. I’m not doing this anymore.” That would last for about five days until suddenly I would read something and think, “You know, that’s a really interesting idea for a story,” and then I was back at it again. So, everyone save yourselves...it’s too late for me.

Q: To make matters worse, you have this compulsion to write science fiction and fantasy. Did you know that was what you were going to be doing, from the beginning?

Frost: That I did know. By whatever process I’m hardwired for fantasy and horror probably more than science fiction. Every idea I have just is bent in that sense. I’ve even tried to have ideas that don’t bend in that direction, but it doesn’t work. I’ll start out trying to write something that’s not got any fantasy element in it at all, and the next thing I know it’s turned left and dragged me over here where something’s rotting or something unnatural is about to happen or the resolution incorporates the fantastic. It’s where the stories go for me.

Q: This probably is something you have to bring up in writing classes a lot: how much is the writer in control?

Frost: I start off writing classes usually, telling them the way I’m wired and the way I work. I think the writer’s in control to the extent that, at least in my process, my unconscious writer, whoever or whatever he is, is in control when I am first-drafting a story. I am in a way not trying to consciously control it. I probably have a sense of where I want to go. I probably have a notion of the structure somewhere in the back of my mind, but it’s more of the automatic writing side of me that’s run off with the story.

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