Ask the Author: David Albertyn
Answered Questions (10)
David Albertyn
Wow, what a great question! This requires some thought:
- Details: Lynn Coady: I'll start with Canadian writer Lynn Coady for details. She can craft a subtle but evocative detail here and there that paints such a full picture and provides real insight into a place, person, or situation.
- Character: Leo Tolstoy: for character sketches, I would hire Tolstoy. He has the incredible ability of illuminating a character, where at the end of the character sketch, you as the reader think, yes, I know exactly this person. I've met this exact sort of person before and he captured them perfectly. Not only does Tolstoy pull this off for one or two characters, but for countless different types of characters.
- Humour/Satire: Paul Beatty: for humour and satire I would choose the scathing wit of Paul Beatty. He is both incisive and funny, such an effective combination.
- Descriptions: Jane Austen: Austen writes so beautifully, with such care and attention to detail, that you feel you're right there with her characters in the English countryside.
- World Building: J.R.R. Tolkien: for me there is only one choice on this one - even though there are so many great world builders out there (maybe I can find another subject for Ursula Le Guin) - Tolkien takes you to another world, and in so doing makes the world we are in seem so much richer and more magical.
- Dialogue: William Shakespeare: took the easy choice on this one, but how can you turn him down for dialogue?
- Plot: Michael Crichton: just so many imaginative ideas, which sparked my imagination growing up to such a degree. Whatever Crichton's shortcomings, original, dynamic plots was not one of them.
- Action: Virgil: I was amazed when I read The Aeneid of how immediate was the action, for something written in ancient times and long before the advent of film, as the action feels so filmic. There are scenes in The Aeneid that are so thrilling, epic, and cataclysmic that I was stunned. I could see it in my mind's eye as sure as if I was watching the most riveting action scenes in a film.
- Tension: Haruki Murakami: Murakami has an amazing ability to generate foreboding without that much going on, nor that much that is necessarily menacing happening, and yet the reader feels such a sense of menace. A quiet, intangible fear and anxiety closes in from the corners - really a special quality to attain in one's work.
- Theme: Sophocles: in Oedipus Rex, Sophocles works theme to perfection, unravelling strands in real time over the course of one afternoon that tie together so beautifully and (unfortunately for Oedipus) horrifically.
- Voice: Edward P. Jones: he has a style that really influenced me, where he moves seamlessly between past, present, and future while a story moves forward chronologically. I've read writers who have done something similar, but never quite in the way Jones pulls it off. There is also a grittiness and toughness to his characters and language, and at the same time an incredible warmth and empathy for those characters. I just found it an incredible voice that I would love to be able to emulate (am still trying on that one, haha).
- Wonder: Ursula Le Guin: I managed to get her in :-) The fantasy I respond to the most are the works with a sense of wonder. Where the magnificence and power of the natural world is shown to be beautiful, at times unknowable, and most of all magical. I feel that Le Guin does this to such a high level. I feel that I have been on the seas with Ged in a little boat, watching the light fade on a far horizon.
So these are some of the instructors and subjects I would definitely choose. But with so many magnificent writers and different aspects to writing, one could surely pick a variety of alternatives. Great question!
- Details: Lynn Coady: I'll start with Canadian writer Lynn Coady for details. She can craft a subtle but evocative detail here and there that paints such a full picture and provides real insight into a place, person, or situation.
- Character: Leo Tolstoy: for character sketches, I would hire Tolstoy. He has the incredible ability of illuminating a character, where at the end of the character sketch, you as the reader think, yes, I know exactly this person. I've met this exact sort of person before and he captured them perfectly. Not only does Tolstoy pull this off for one or two characters, but for countless different types of characters.
- Humour/Satire: Paul Beatty: for humour and satire I would choose the scathing wit of Paul Beatty. He is both incisive and funny, such an effective combination.
- Descriptions: Jane Austen: Austen writes so beautifully, with such care and attention to detail, that you feel you're right there with her characters in the English countryside.
- World Building: J.R.R. Tolkien: for me there is only one choice on this one - even though there are so many great world builders out there (maybe I can find another subject for Ursula Le Guin) - Tolkien takes you to another world, and in so doing makes the world we are in seem so much richer and more magical.
- Dialogue: William Shakespeare: took the easy choice on this one, but how can you turn him down for dialogue?
- Plot: Michael Crichton: just so many imaginative ideas, which sparked my imagination growing up to such a degree. Whatever Crichton's shortcomings, original, dynamic plots was not one of them.
- Action: Virgil: I was amazed when I read The Aeneid of how immediate was the action, for something written in ancient times and long before the advent of film, as the action feels so filmic. There are scenes in The Aeneid that are so thrilling, epic, and cataclysmic that I was stunned. I could see it in my mind's eye as sure as if I was watching the most riveting action scenes in a film.
- Tension: Haruki Murakami: Murakami has an amazing ability to generate foreboding without that much going on, nor that much that is necessarily menacing happening, and yet the reader feels such a sense of menace. A quiet, intangible fear and anxiety closes in from the corners - really a special quality to attain in one's work.
- Theme: Sophocles: in Oedipus Rex, Sophocles works theme to perfection, unravelling strands in real time over the course of one afternoon that tie together so beautifully and (unfortunately for Oedipus) horrifically.
- Voice: Edward P. Jones: he has a style that really influenced me, where he moves seamlessly between past, present, and future while a story moves forward chronologically. I've read writers who have done something similar, but never quite in the way Jones pulls it off. There is also a grittiness and toughness to his characters and language, and at the same time an incredible warmth and empathy for those characters. I just found it an incredible voice that I would love to be able to emulate (am still trying on that one, haha).
- Wonder: Ursula Le Guin: I managed to get her in :-) The fantasy I respond to the most are the works with a sense of wonder. Where the magnificence and power of the natural world is shown to be beautiful, at times unknowable, and most of all magical. I feel that Le Guin does this to such a high level. I feel that I have been on the seas with Ged in a little boat, watching the light fade on a far horizon.
So these are some of the instructors and subjects I would definitely choose. But with so many magnificent writers and different aspects to writing, one could surely pick a variety of alternatives. Great question!
David Albertyn
It was really a number of ideas that had been lingering with me for a long time, which fortunately all fit together in one narrative to become Undercard. The first idea, however, the core of the entire book, was to centre a story on friends who had been extremely close growing up but now, as adults estranged from one another, their motivations collide. How these people navigated their conflicting loyalties to their friends, their families, their communities, and themselves would be the central theme of the book. While the characters are superficially quite different to me, navigating my various responsibilities to the people in my life, society at large, myself and my career has been something I've thought about a great deal in my adult life. Questions like, who should I be? How best do I contribute to the world? What path should I take forward, and once determined, how best should I go about pursuing it? What are my responsibilities to the people around me, and how best do I fulfil them? In essence I divided my thoughts on the matter between the four main characters of Undercard, who each have different insights and answers to the above questions. (To learn more about the other ideas that went into the making of Undercard, please visit the media page on my website with links to interviews where I elaborate on this subject.)
David Albertyn
I have a routine that helps me get into the mode of writing whereby I read from a novel that stylistically I would like to emulate for about 10 minutes. Then I read from my own work, starting a little further back from my furthest point, for about 5-10 minutes, to get back into the flow of the style I've been using for that piece. And then I begin writing. I think of it as similar to a warm up for a musician or an athlete, and I feel that by the end of the warm up my brain is in a well-focused and inspired state, while also being in the rhythm of the language and style I want to use for that stretch of writing.
As for general inspiration: I like telling people my story ideas. I know some writers prefer to keep their ideas locked up until they've finished a draft or several, but what inspires me is oral storytelling. Sharing my story with another person, experiencing their reaction, imagining the characters and their situation together, gets me excited to create the story on the page. Also my original ideas develop a great deal through this process before I ever start writing, because as I bounce my idea off other people, they often lend their own insights and provide great ideas that I end up using, or just the act of telling someone a story, trying to entertain them, I come up with new ideas. So oral storytelling of ideas in their infancy provides probably my greatest inspiration to write. And it creates a foundation from which I can build off when I do sit down to write, as opposed to starting from scratch when I put pen to paper.
As for general inspiration: I like telling people my story ideas. I know some writers prefer to keep their ideas locked up until they've finished a draft or several, but what inspires me is oral storytelling. Sharing my story with another person, experiencing their reaction, imagining the characters and their situation together, gets me excited to create the story on the page. Also my original ideas develop a great deal through this process before I ever start writing, because as I bounce my idea off other people, they often lend their own insights and provide great ideas that I end up using, or just the act of telling someone a story, trying to entertain them, I come up with new ideas. So oral storytelling of ideas in their infancy provides probably my greatest inspiration to write. And it creates a foundation from which I can build off when I do sit down to write, as opposed to starting from scratch when I put pen to paper.
David Albertyn
I am currently working on a novel that like my first one, Undercard, is a mix of crime fiction, sports, and literary themes, while also playing with time and different perspectives, but from there it is quite a divergence. The new novel revolves around sordid relationships that develop between people connected to a particular tennis club. I'm hoping it will be a lot of fun. With Undercard I tried to create the grittiest, most intense, most exciting story I possibly could. With this new novel, I'm trying to write the funniest book I possibly can. Sex, humour, murder...and tennis. I'm excited to finish it and share it.
David Albertyn
As a tennis coach, I love this question! I love seeing people improve at whatever they set their minds to. And my first advice for aspiring writers is to simply keep improving. This is obviously far easier said than done, but I believe that the mentality to keep improving is what will make the act of writing as rewarding as possible as well as engender the greatest opportunities for the writer. I believe this should always be the writer's primary focus and not the myriad extraneous aspects of writing. If one can keep taking their writing ability up in incremental degrees, eventually, no matter what their starting point, they will be producing great work.
As a kid, a friend told me that Michael Crichton went through a great number of drafts on his novels. This was very beneficial for me to learn, as at the time I couldn't love Jurassic Park more, and comparing it to my own writing (I was probably 12 at the time and harder on myself than I should've been) I thought mine was of such a poor standard. But I started saying to myself, anything good you ever read went through a thousand drafts. And that stayed with me. Throughout my life, no matter what people said to me about my writing, I always had the mentality that if I just wrote enough drafts I could produce a great novel. Going through multiple drafts, really pushing hard to improve the manuscript every time, is a great way to improve your writing, and that particular story.
I'd also say to be resilient. Writers might not traditionally be associated with toughness, but one really does have to be tough in a variety of ways in this position. There's no doubt that it is daunting to put your work out into the world, especially when you have poured so much passion and effort into it. One way of developing that thick skin is to take pride in the rejections, the negative reviews, the setbacks, the mistakes made, the opportunities lost. To say to oneself, this is how I improve my resilience as a writer. I cannot improve my resilience when things are going well; I can only improve it through adversity; this is my opportunity to take my resilience to another level. While improving one's writing ability is the most important thing, I would say that developing one's resilience is the second most important thing. Because the setbacks will come at every stage of the journey, and weathering them is a major factor in continuing that journey.
As a kid, a friend told me that Michael Crichton went through a great number of drafts on his novels. This was very beneficial for me to learn, as at the time I couldn't love Jurassic Park more, and comparing it to my own writing (I was probably 12 at the time and harder on myself than I should've been) I thought mine was of such a poor standard. But I started saying to myself, anything good you ever read went through a thousand drafts. And that stayed with me. Throughout my life, no matter what people said to me about my writing, I always had the mentality that if I just wrote enough drafts I could produce a great novel. Going through multiple drafts, really pushing hard to improve the manuscript every time, is a great way to improve your writing, and that particular story.
I'd also say to be resilient. Writers might not traditionally be associated with toughness, but one really does have to be tough in a variety of ways in this position. There's no doubt that it is daunting to put your work out into the world, especially when you have poured so much passion and effort into it. One way of developing that thick skin is to take pride in the rejections, the negative reviews, the setbacks, the mistakes made, the opportunities lost. To say to oneself, this is how I improve my resilience as a writer. I cannot improve my resilience when things are going well; I can only improve it through adversity; this is my opportunity to take my resilience to another level. While improving one's writing ability is the most important thing, I would say that developing one's resilience is the second most important thing. Because the setbacks will come at every stage of the journey, and weathering them is a major factor in continuing that journey.
David Albertyn
My way of getting over a resistance to write is to just push out sentences. If I feel stuck, I try to have the mentality that the scene I'm about to write is just for me to know my characters and story better, and there's a good chance I won't even use the scene in the final manuscript. That takes the pressure off of it having to be perfect. Sometimes I do scrap the scene, but the act of writing it does spark ideas and then other scenes follow. But often the scene itself does work and I will use it.
I also use a technique that I learned from reading about the processes of other writers, in which if you feel stuck on a scene and can't get into it, you just skip it and move on to the next scene. Often you'll find that the difficult scene was unnecessary and that's why it was so hard to get into and you never need write it (or at least this was the case for me, and the person I read it from: Hemingway).
If you're having trouble coming up with a new story, or beginning a new story, then I would say, similar to above, trial and error. Keep trying different ideas and while you might hit a number of dead ends, the process will spark a host of new ideas that will work. Remember, you can always cannibalize your own work, so no ideas are ever wasted. My novel Undercard took a great deal from my previous unpublished works.
Lastly, I will say that writing, when the attempt is to produce your best work, is extremely exhausting. So often I am just too exhausted to write, and then my focus is on resting my brain as much as I can to regain my energy and get back to writing. I hope this is helpful.
I also use a technique that I learned from reading about the processes of other writers, in which if you feel stuck on a scene and can't get into it, you just skip it and move on to the next scene. Often you'll find that the difficult scene was unnecessary and that's why it was so hard to get into and you never need write it (or at least this was the case for me, and the person I read it from: Hemingway).
If you're having trouble coming up with a new story, or beginning a new story, then I would say, similar to above, trial and error. Keep trying different ideas and while you might hit a number of dead ends, the process will spark a host of new ideas that will work. Remember, you can always cannibalize your own work, so no ideas are ever wasted. My novel Undercard took a great deal from my previous unpublished works.
Lastly, I will say that writing, when the attempt is to produce your best work, is extremely exhausting. So often I am just too exhausted to write, and then my focus is on resting my brain as much as I can to regain my energy and get back to writing. I hope this is helpful.
David Albertyn
"Goodbye, my love," he said to the body, as he turned for the shovel. A cold, iron grip on his ankle: "No need, my dear."
David Albertyn
The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel
The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right, David Renton
Peak: How to Master Almost Anything, Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool
Blacktop Wasteland, S. A. Cosby
Lost in the City, Edward P. Jones
The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right, David Renton
Peak: How to Master Almost Anything, Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool
Blacktop Wasteland, S. A. Cosby
Lost in the City, Edward P. Jones
David Albertyn
Whoa, what a great question! Well, I've probably spent most of my life imagining I was in Middle-Earth when hiking or running in nature, so that would be my first choice. All those different trails, hills, mountains, rivers, woods, and forests, it would be a dream for me. One of the countless things I love about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is that most of those books is people walking in nature (ironically I know some people dislike that aspect of the book, but I love it). Also to witness magic and meet all the different peoples of that world--other than the nefarious ones--would be wonderful.
My second choice is an odd one considering the fate of the characters involved, but I would love to go to Jurassic Park (although hopefully not get eaten). I love animals so much, and the thought of being on a tropical island witnessing dinosaurs--well, let's just say that I've often imagined I was in Jurassic Park when hiking and running in nature as well.
Now a high fantasy novel that has dinosaurs in it, that is a book I want to read! Maybe I'll have to write it one day.
My second choice is an odd one considering the fate of the characters involved, but I would love to go to Jurassic Park (although hopefully not get eaten). I love animals so much, and the thought of being on a tropical island witnessing dinosaurs--well, let's just say that I've often imagined I was in Jurassic Park when hiking and running in nature as well.
Now a high fantasy novel that has dinosaurs in it, that is a book I want to read! Maybe I'll have to write it one day.
David Albertyn
The best thing about being a writer is when you're reading over your work and a line jumps out at you that you forgot you wrote. And you're moved by your own line, as if it was someone else's. It's a wonderful feeling.
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