Jessica
asked
Jeff VanderMeer:
Your projects tend to be a little out-of-the-box: huge anthologies that could kill people if they fell asleep reading them, books that are hard to summarize, and a writing book that was basically an art project as well. Do you ever get stuck and think, "Oh god, what am I doing? Did I bite off more than I can chew? Who is going to buy this?"
Jeff VanderMeer
Thanks for the question, Jessica. The answer to biting off more than I can chew--all the time. But I'm guided by the first writer who completely ignited my senses and my creative brain: Angela Carter. She always said that your reach should exceed your grasp, that it wasn't worth not going for broke. Even if you wind up not getting all the way there, you get farther than you would have otherwise. So I take a lot of leaps off of cliffs and have faith I'll have knitted myself the parachute before I hit.
But I never ask "Who is going to buy this?" One of my most successful creations was the Lambshead fake disease guide. If I'd stopped to ask "Who is going to buy this?" I'd never have started that project, and it wound up getting a huge amount of attention, being translated into other languages, and involving writers like Neil Gaiman.
That said, it is a bit of a relief that the Southern Reach novels are easy to summarize: strange place, expeditions into it, secret agency overseeing it. The end!!
But I never ask "Who is going to buy this?" One of my most successful creations was the Lambshead fake disease guide. If I'd stopped to ask "Who is going to buy this?" I'd never have started that project, and it wound up getting a huge amount of attention, being translated into other languages, and involving writers like Neil Gaiman.
That said, it is a bit of a relief that the Southern Reach novels are easy to summarize: strange place, expeditions into it, secret agency overseeing it. The end!!
More Answered Questions
Mike
asked
Jeff VanderMeer:
Jeff, first off let me say I really enjoyed the first two books of The Southern Reach Trilogy. I saw that the series has been optioned to be a movie. If you had access to any artistic team in the history of cinema, who would you want to do the adapting of your story to the big screen?
Sheryl
asked
Jeff VanderMeer:
Regarding POV in Wonderbook: What is the best way to solidify an omniscient objective POV in the mind of the reader as they enter a story – without making the narrator a defined presence or character in his own right? I find that readers sometimes latch on to the first character to speak or act and respond as though the story was written in third person limited. Thus, POV shifts read as inappropriate head hopping.
Robin Sloan
asked
Jeff VanderMeer:
Throughout the Southern Reach books there's a great creepy litany that we hear many times, the one that begins "Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner …" How did that come to exist? Did it spill out of you in a feverish torrent, never to be revised, or did you polish it like poetry?
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