Ask the Author: James Ferron Anderson
Answered Questions (6)
James Ferron Anderson
Finishing writing Terminal City, and seeing that the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, changing from the world of timber-framed houses downtown to the city of glass it is today, had many more stories to tell, and that I wanted to people this place with interesting and believable characters, and tell of them and their hopes and dreams and successes and failures and loves and hates.
What I really wanted, as with any location, as with Footner, my fictional version of the real-life Walhachin of The River and The Sea, was to live there for a while, to walk its streets, talk to its people, learn what it would be like to be there, to be them, to be an outsider among them too, and writing fiction about them was a way to accomplish that.
What I really wanted, as with any location, as with Footner, my fictional version of the real-life Walhachin of The River and The Sea, was to live there for a while, to walk its streets, talk to its people, learn what it would be like to be there, to be them, to be an outsider among them too, and writing fiction about them was a way to accomplish that.
James Ferron Anderson
Reading something, seeing something, hearing something, and thinking that’s interesting: I want to know more about that. Then being more hooked, for some reason I might not, probably won’t, understand, by this thing and not by hundreds of others. Being hooked by two things more often, and wanting to put them together and make a bigger, more striking, thing.
For example in The River and The Sea I was enthralled by the ideas of middle-class English people (as they exclusively were) buying a dream sight unseen and moving six thousand miles to begin a life there, trying to grow fruit in a stony desert, and their attitudes of superiority to all other races, nationalities and classes. This tied in with my interest at that time in the very similar attitudes of Franklyn and others in the Arctic and Robert Falcon Scott in the Antarctic. Men dying and starving in the cold while apple orchards died of heat and drought, both killed by beliefs in Empire and class that should have died in the trenches of France and hadn’t.
For example in The River and The Sea I was enthralled by the ideas of middle-class English people (as they exclusively were) buying a dream sight unseen and moving six thousand miles to begin a life there, trying to grow fruit in a stony desert, and their attitudes of superiority to all other races, nationalities and classes. This tied in with my interest at that time in the very similar attitudes of Franklyn and others in the Arctic and Robert Falcon Scott in the Antarctic. Men dying and starving in the cold while apple orchards died of heat and drought, both killed by beliefs in Empire and class that should have died in the trenches of France and hadn’t.
James Ferron Anderson
I was working on a love story with death and loss, my usual tropes, and decided I was forging ahead before I knew well enough where it was going, what I really wanted to say with it. To keep going would have been wrong, wasteful, the wrong decision, and all writing is about making one decision or choice after another, and hoping to get as many right as possible. So I’m note making, thinking, trying to get my people more fully in my head before I go on, asking each one of them questions like:
What do you really want?
What’s stopping you getting it?
Will you succeed?
How do your desires and success and failures effect everyone else in the book?
Do I care enough about you, whether I like you or not?
What do you really want?
What’s stopping you getting it?
Will you succeed?
How do your desires and success and failures effect everyone else in the book?
Do I care enough about you, whether I like you or not?
James Ferron Anderson
Tell yourself the stories of whoever your people are, in whatever location or time it is, over and over until their lives make some sort of intriguing, believable, shapeable, sense.
We are telling ourselves these stories first and foremost, experiencing these people and this place in a way we can never otherwise do, but would like to, and hoping others, readers, will like to experience it too. But first it must be us experiencing it. Then struggling to express it.
So write. Get it right later. Then re-write and re-write. On and on. The usual advice: when you have a draft, leave it. Write something else. Go back to it. See how it feels, looks, tastes different. Re-write again. It will never be good enough, not if you care about writing, but some day it will be taking commas out and putting them back in again. Then, if you can, get some others to read it. Listen to what they say, and pay attention to only that which makes sense. Re-write. Yip. Then maybe it will be worth someone else's money and time.
We are telling ourselves these stories first and foremost, experiencing these people and this place in a way we can never otherwise do, but would like to, and hoping others, readers, will like to experience it too. But first it must be us experiencing it. Then struggling to express it.
So write. Get it right later. Then re-write and re-write. On and on. The usual advice: when you have a draft, leave it. Write something else. Go back to it. See how it feels, looks, tastes different. Re-write again. It will never be good enough, not if you care about writing, but some day it will be taking commas out and putting them back in again. Then, if you can, get some others to read it. Listen to what they say, and pay attention to only that which makes sense. Re-write. Yip. Then maybe it will be worth someone else's money and time.
James Ferron Anderson
Not sure.
Sometimes getting a thing right, or that feels right… a sentence, phrase, description, just the right word choice for that occasion. To shorten a sentence, add a word, move a comma, change a scene, and make the work all the better for it. Any of the things that make it feel that I have an art and that I’m practicing it well just then. Then it’s back to re-writing and the continuing search for more of the same, for more of those moments.
And to come back to that choice a week, a year, five years later, and still feel it was the right choice… that’s affirming. That’s good. Sometimes it happens.
Sometimes getting a thing right, or that feels right… a sentence, phrase, description, just the right word choice for that occasion. To shorten a sentence, add a word, move a comma, change a scene, and make the work all the better for it. Any of the things that make it feel that I have an art and that I’m practicing it well just then. Then it’s back to re-writing and the continuing search for more of the same, for more of those moments.
And to come back to that choice a week, a year, five years later, and still feel it was the right choice… that’s affirming. That’s good. Sometimes it happens.
James Ferron Anderson
It doesn’t exist.
Have you ever heard of lab assistant block? Teacher block? Carpenter block? Of course not. You do it and accept that some days you’ll do it better than others. Then re-write. And re-write. You’ll be doing that anyway.
To believe it exists is to give it a power it doesn’t otherwise have.
Positivity. Writer’s block is a figment of other people’s imagination. You’ve got plenty of your own. You don’t need their old stuff.
Have you ever heard of lab assistant block? Teacher block? Carpenter block? Of course not. You do it and accept that some days you’ll do it better than others. Then re-write. And re-write. You’ll be doing that anyway.
To believe it exists is to give it a power it doesn’t otherwise have.
Positivity. Writer’s block is a figment of other people’s imagination. You’ve got plenty of your own. You don’t need their old stuff.
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