An Interview With Ian Benke
Finally is just persistence. I started writing as a career in 2005, and it’s not till a decade and a half later that I’m no longer scrambling to freelance and able to focus on the writing. Sometimes you have to be willing to give up some stuff — I stopped playing World of Warcraft, for example, even though I’d played since the original beta, because it was too easy to put time into that rather than writing.
Science Fiction and Fantasy are hugely popular genres. What does it take for a writer today, to write compelling and successful Science Fiction and Fantasy stories? Authority Magazine started a new series called “How To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories”. In this series we are talking to anyone who is a Science Fiction or Fantasy author, or an authority or expert on how to write compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Cat Rambo.
Cat Rambo is an American science fiction and fantasy writer and editor. She was co-editor of Fantasy Magazine from 2007 to 2011, which earned her a 2012 World Fantasy Special Award: Non-Professional nomination. She collaborated with Jeff VanderMeer on The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories, published in 2007.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share a story about what first drew you to writing over other forms of storytelling?
I was a voracious reader from early days. My babysitter, Bernadette, was reading out loud to me from J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit, and I started reading ahead because I was so impatient to find out what happened next. I felt so guilty about that! But I just couldn’t resist the pull of the story.
In those pre-Internet days I was enormously lucky in that my paternal grandmother was a writer who wrote young adult sports novels, and would get me any book I was interested in reading. I grew up in a house full of books, and haunted the library as soon as I had that crucial library card. I write because I love to read — to me, that’s the art form that has the most draw and the one I want to create.
You are a successful author. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
I think a certain stubbornness, or perhaps persistence, has been helpful. This can be a very weird career path, full of lurches, and believing in oneself strongly enough to be able to continue lurching along is certainly key. When I first quit working at Microsoft in order to freelance, I took all sorts of jobs, including transcribing someone’s grandmother’s handwritten journal, creating a reading recommendations website, and writing encyclopedia articles, to name a few, in order to be able to make some weekly income.
Along the same lines, I don’t take myself overly seriously. Life is absurd, and in my experience trying to maintain too much dignity is the surest way to lose it. So when I had a story briefly on the Nebula ballot a few years ago but had to withdraw it, I didn’t spend too much time pouting or feeling put around that my genius hadn’t been sufficiently recognized. A couple of years after that, I was on the ballot again for Carpe Glitter and won. And yet I am pretty much the same human being, whether or not I’m brandishing that chunk of Lucite.
Finally, the fact that I love to learn new things has paid off. Because I run an online school that brings in other writers to teach, I often ask people to teach classes that I myself want to take, like a class on using the I-Ching in writing that Henry Lien taught or one on writing neurodiversity taught by Xander Odell. I think that’s one reason I get better, because I actively work at my craft.
Can you tell us a bit about the interesting or exciting projects you are working on or wish to create? What are your goals for these projects?
I always have at least a handful of projects going! Right now I have two novels in the process of being drafted, one of which is the third book in the space opera series and the other of which is the final Tabat book, bringing that fantasy quartet to an end.
Next year, an anthology, The Reinvented Heart, which I co-edited with Jenn Brozek, is appearing early in the year, and we’re working on the follow-up, The Reinvented Detective, right now, with plans for more books in the series going forward, at a rate of one per year. I’ve also got a middle-grade space opera that’s drafted but needs editing, and some other novels hovering in the wings. So much to do!
Wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. How do you define sci-fi or fantasy? How is it different from speculative fiction?
Speculative fiction is fiction that asks what if, a question about our own times that may dress it up in all sorts of guises, including fantasy or science fiction. Science fiction is fiction that depends on things that exist, actual science, while fantasy depends on magic. Like any definition about very big things, there’s some problems with that — where does slipstream fit, for instance? — but some truth at the heart.
It seems that despite countless changes in media and communication technologies, novels and written fiction always survive, and as the rate of change increases with technology, written sci-fi becomes more popular. Why do you think that is?
Fiction is more interactive than any movie or even game can be, because it demands that the reader supply so much more. People must hold another world in their head, and in the hands of a skillful writer, they are experiencing so much: the giddy sway of a boat’s deck underfoot, the relentless pressure of a rocket ship accelerating, the stink and Sulphur of a dragon’s breath.
In your opinion, what are the benefits to reading sci-fi/fantasy, and how do they compare to watching sci-fi/fantasy on film and television?
I will always opt for reading, for the reason outlined in the previous answer. It’s simply more immersive. But if I’m watching sci-fi/fantasy, I want spectacle and glitz and beauty that stuns me. And preferably a good sound-track too.
What authors and artists, dead or alive, inspired you to write?
Ursula K. Le Guin would be an early one, with her Earthsea trilogy, as would J.R. R. Tolkein. When I was eight or nine, my grandmother gave me a kids’ book about writing, written by Jacqueline Jackson, called Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail, and while I certainly worked all the way through it and did some of the exercises, it was the annotated bibliography in the back that let me find all sorts of wonderful reading.
Le Guin popped up again as I became a teen reader, with The Left Hand of Darkness and her other adult science fiction. I read so much great stuff in those years: C.J. Cherryh and Jo Clayton, Joanna Russ, Fritz Leiber, Thomas Burnett Swann, Andre Norton, just to name a few.
If you could ask your favourite Science Fiction and Fantasy author a question, what would it be?
That’s a really hard question, because I’ve been lucky enough to meet so many of my heroes. I guess if I had to ask a question of someone wiser than myself, it’d be something like, “How do you manage to stay cheerful?” rather than something about writing. Or actually maybe it’d be about omniscient point of view because I’ve been writing in that for a while now and still am not sure I understand it completely. Who would I ask that of? I really am not sure, because I don’t think Jane Austen counts as F&SF.
We’d like to learn more about your writing. How would you describe yourself as an author? Can you please share a specific passage that you think exemplifies your style?
I think I tend to be a little more literary than some, a little more emotional than others. Here’s the beginning of a story, “The Subtler Art,” that works well as an intro, I think.
Anything can happen in Serendib, the city built of dimensions intersecting, and this is what happened there once.
The noodle shop that lies on the border between the neighborhood of Yddle, which is really a forest, houses strapped to the wide trunks, and Eclect, an industrial quarter, is claimed by both, with equally little reason.
The shop was its own Territory, with laws differing from either area, although the same can be said of many eating establishments in the City of a Thousand Parts. But the noodles were hand shaved, and the sauce was made of minced ginger and chopped green onions with a little soy sauce and a dash of enlightenment, and they were unequaled in Serendib.
Based on your own experience and success, what are the “Five Things You Need To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories?” If you can, please share a story or example for each?
The first thing that you need to write anything is butt in chair and a willingness to just write, without worrying about whether or not what you’re writing is publishable. You can always fix it in post. Some of my best stories are the messiest in first draft. Two recent stories that required all sorts of moving passages around and figuring out their order were “Crazy Beautiful” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and “Every Breath a Question, Every Heartbeat an Answer” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
The second is attention to the world and figuring out how to convey that. I love reading food-writing because there are so many wonderful words for tastes and techniques and textures. I’ve been creating cookie recipes themed for the book, and it has been so much fun playing around with those!
A third is a knowledge of emotion and how complicated it can be, the fact that you can love and hate someone at the same time, or that you can feel conflicted in all sorts of ways. I recently read a wonderful book by Don Maas about getting emotion into your fiction, and he had a great tip that I’ve been using ever since. He suggests that you not worry about the predominant emotion, or even the second most predominant, but drill down to a third emotion. The other two will be obvious to the reader from context, but when you are down digging around past those first easy layers, you find interesting and useful stuff.
Fourth is knowing the form you’re working in, so you can take advantage of what it offers you and make the most of it. That requires deep reading, as well as thinking about what you’re reading. In writing the book, I didn’t read so much as explore the genre in other forms, most notably film, television, and video games. Those video games, in fact, provided a lot of my morning walk’s soundtrack.
Finally is just persistence. I started writing as a career in 2005, and it’s not till a decade and a half later that I’m no longer scrambling to freelance and able to focus on the writing. Sometimes you have to be willing to give up some stuff — I stopped playing World of Warcraft, for example, even though I’d played since the original beta, because it was too easy to put time into that rather than writing.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Entertainment, Business, VC funding, and Sports read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them 🙂
I would love to chat with Yvette Nicole Brown, because I have been watching Cosplay Melee lately and I can tell she loves this community as much as I do. Even without meeting her, ten thousand hearts to her for all she does and her absolute, shining sweetness.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
If you check my website, I have links to all sorts of stories on this page! http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/fiction/
You can also find me on Twitter and Facebook as @catrambo and on Instagram as @specfic.
Thank you for these excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent. We wish you continued success.
Author Cat Rambo On How To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.