Ask Steve Rasnic Tem - Saturday, August 24th! discussion

Welcome to the group! Steve will be answering questions throughout the day on Saturday, August 24th in this thread only. In the meantime if you have a question for Steve or just want to introduce yourself feel free to do so in this thread.

Hi Steve!

Right off the bat, let me just say that i'm a huge fan of your short stories and avidly search anthologies to spot your name.

I have just completed reading The Man on the Ceiling several weeks back, and i must say that the experience left me quite raw. Jumping into it without any prior info, it took me by surprise. The very personal nature of the story - about parents, children and loss - struck a chord with me. A product of a broken home, there were some parts that seemed to mirror the fears of my childhood - especially those related to your father.

Well, without meandering further, my questions are these: How difficult was it to write from such a personal experience and put it out there for others? Did you have to "tone down" the content to make it easier for you and Melanie to get through the process of writing? Or did you have to "tweak" the story to make it more palatable for general reading?

I have also written down personal experiences, but mostly as a form of therapy to sort of "get it out of the system", but i doubt i'd ever be brave enough to have anyone else read them. What was your initial reaction when your personal account was bestowed awards?

I'm sorry if my question comes off as too personal in nature. You need not reply if you think it as such.

Thank you in advance for taking time to read this, and i look forward to your new book.

Shob, Kuala Lumpur

Hi Mr.Tem,

One of the things I love about your work is the sharp concision of the writing, something I know you've heard many times before. I especially love the stories that are broken down into vignettes or the way the chapters in Deadfall hotel were practically stand-alone. I know this is certainly not the only way you write but is it a preferred strategy? Have you ever written something that you then cut down to the bare bone or do you tend to compose with using the fewest words already in mind?

Thank you so much, you've taken up many hours of my life in the best way possible,

Patrick

Shob,

Thanks so much for the kind words! I think the biggest hurdle in writing a piece in which you, personally, become one of the characters, is that sense of embarrassment, that fear of revealing too much and making yourself vulnerable to criticism. That book is not something we could have written when we were younger, because of that vulnerability, and also because it wouldn’t have seemed professional somehow. Writers, especially younger writers, want to maintain a certain objectivity, a certain distance. There is a desire to be “emotionally cool” to the material which makes you appear, and feel, to be in control.

But at least for us, once we got into our fifties, we discovered that we cared a great deal less about what other people might think, and “coolness” was a quality which no longer mattered. What mattered was “story” and giving everything required by the story, and in The Man On The Ceiling we felt we had a story concept which would allow us to do and say things in our writing we’d never done before. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.

So once we were past that hurdle, “toning down” and “tweaking” would have defeated the purpose-we needed to do whatever we felt the story required. And some parts of the story were difficult, even devastating to write. But you do what you feel you have to do. In terms of the writing, however, the most difficult part was figuring out what the “rules” of this particular fiction needed to be—how to determine what worked and what didn’t. That’s what consumed most of our time. And for the most part it came down to “telling the truth.” If we became too fanciful, or too complicated in the writing, or veered too far from the basic issues of love and children, we had to rein it back to maintain that sense of truthfulness.

But in that sense The Man On The Ceiling is no different than any other writing when you attempt to step somewhat outside the box of conventional genre expectations. You have to figure out how to know when the story works and when it doesn’t. You may have stepped outside a reader’s normal set of expectations, but in writing the piece you’re creating other reading expectations you have to address. In my new collection Celestial Inventories I tend to step between genres, allowing the characters’ desires and dreams to drive the stories rather than the usual expectations of genre. One character feels like he is invisible to other people, another feels a mysterious bond with strangers, another discovers a peculiar bond with children who have recently passed away. In all of these I was challenged to figure out what did and did not work and structure the stories accordingly.

Oh, and as far as the awards for The Man On The Ceiling are concerned, we were completely taken by surprise. We doubted we’d ever sell it, or that anyone would even read it—all we knew was that it was important for us to write.

Thanks Patrick,

I guess it really depends on the piece. My tendency is to write “long” in the first draft in order to explore and find the emotional “heart” of the story, the rhythm and the poetry inherent in the content. Then I go back through and strip out the unnecessary, the additional verbiage that clouds the meaning or blunts the emotional impact. I find that it’s usually much more fruitful to strip away the excess from something that is overwritten than to add more to something which is underwritten or under-developed, in part because I find that when writers add on to a piece because they’re afraid it isn’t working well enough or communicating their meaning, they actually tend to add words they don’t really need.

On the other hand, if I know from the beginning that the story is going to be really short, I approach it a little differently. I build the story one sentence at a time, trying to find the fewest words possible in order to create emotion and build my meaning. It’s a bit like composing a poem. There’s one story, “Origami Bird,” in my Celestial Inventories collection, which at around 500 words is I think the finest short short I’ve ever written, and it took longer for me to write it than stories many times its length, because of that slowed-down, one sentence at a time writing process.

Patrickmalka wrote: "Hi Mr.Tem,

One of the things I love about your work is the sharp concision of the writing, something I know you've heard many times before. I especially love the stories that are broken down into..."

Steve

I have only discovered your work recently, having read Deadfall Hotel, and just wanted to say how much I enjoyed that book, but also how unusual and heartfelt it seems to be. I was impressed by the way the characters seem so real, even against a fantastic background. Thanks for writing it, and I'm looking to e poring your other works!

David

Thanks David,

That's great to hear. Characters are key for me. I believe that unless they feel real the fantastic backgrounds of the stories tend to come across as arbitrary. I know when I read I'm looking for fantastic flights of the imagination, but I also want to be touched at an emotional level as well.

Steve wrote: "Thanks Patrick,

I guess it really depends on the piece. My tendency is to write “long” in the first draft in order to explore and find the emotional “heart” of the story, the rhythm and the poetr..."

Thank you so much for that answer. So many lessons in there I'll have to reread it many times.
Celestial Inventories is sitting on my nightstand as I type and I plan to slowly work my way through the stories. I also saw while perusing the solaris website that I can start looking forward to Blood Kin. It sounds fantastic.

I don't want to be greedy but if I may ask another question...
Though it is hard for me to imagine a time where this would have been the case, how did you maintain enthusiasm and hope in the face of early rejection?

Dear Steve,

I read the Man on the Ceiling a few months ago and was struck by the genre melding going on, as well as the raw nature and the personal horrors parents must have, and this inability to ever really know someone else. I was wondering what writers influenced you in the writing of that book, or what authors in general you are loving right now?

-Bethany

Patrick, Rejection is part of the very fabric of the arts. The gatekeepers (whether they be directors, editors, gallery owners) are artists in their own way, and art is about choices, and part of saying yes to some elements is saying no to others as you assemble a magazine, anthology, or publishing program. And I'm still rejected from time to time--I try to see them as opportunities to get into something different than what I'd anticipated. Early in my career, I just tried to see it as part of the learning process, getting better, finding out the places my work fitted and where it didn't fit, and beyond all that remembering that I was the best person to bring my particular stories to life, and that if I didn't tell my stories no one else would.

Thanks Bethany,
To tell you the truth I'm not sure if any particular writer influenced The Man on the Ceiling--we were pretty much winging it and figuring it out along the way, using what we knew about creating both art and life, and attempting to write about both at the same time using ourselves as characters. I was familiar with self-conscious approaches to writing, particularly as used in the New Journalism in which reporters were writing themselves into the stories they were covering (I actually taught a Freshman writing course once using the New Journalism as a model), so I knew the advantages and the disadvantages, but what we tried to do was a little different than that (although maybe Tristram Shandy was an early model?)

I love many many writers right now. Caitlin Kiernan (The Drowning Girl, among others) is a favorite. Nathan Ballingrud's new collection is terrific, and I just wrote an introduction to Lynda E. Rucker's first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange--it's wonderful, especially if you like writers like Robert Aickman. But there are so many more writers I could name--I think it's a golden age for f&sf short fiction.
Bethany wrote: "Dear Steve,

I read the Man on the Ceiling a few months ago and was struck by the genre melding going on, as well as the raw nature and the personal horrors parents must have, and this inability to..."

Here is one last question that just occurred to me: The new collection is from Chizine publications from Canada, I really enjoyed your story in the Canadian journal Shadows and Tall Trees, and I've read many Canadian authors list you as a favourite and an influence. Do you think there is something unique about the current field of Canadian writers and editors and what is it about your work that they respond so strongly to?

I should admit that being born and raised in Montreal, I have a bias in asking this question.

Thanks again for your time today.

Patrick,

Hmmm-that's really an interesting question, and something I've never thought about. I don't really know the answer, but if I had to guess, it may be that a number of those Canadian authors have read British ghost story collections, and British ghost story authors in general have been a major influence on me. So there would be certain aesthetic sympathies. As for Chizine, they have been champions of genre-bending work, and Celestial Inventories clearly represents the slipstream, harder to classify segment of my work, so they seemed to be a likely candidate as a publisher for this book from the very beginning. And they do beautiful books, with some of the finest design work in publishing.

Steve,

Thank you for your reply. It was enlightening to hear your views and read your response to all the questions. It does give me a better perspective on how i should approach my story, and the element of truths that need to be told.

I do have a tendency to write in shorts bursts, and then overdo it by adding details later – mostly superfluous – to try to make it "make more sense" for the reader. This has been a cause of endless frustration, and the abandonment of several better ideas.

I guess I should stop doing that and strip it down further instead to the bare essentials - to just the truths that need to be told.

Again, thank you for the insight. And i look forward to more of your writings.

Shob


Steve wrote: "Shob,

Thanks so much for the kind words! I think the biggest hurdle in writing a piece in which you, personally, become one of the characters, ..."