Short Story Connect discussion

Join us on February 10, 2016 for a special discussion with author Marc Nash: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5...

If you have a question for Marc Nash please post it in this thread, where he will be discussing his writing.

Remember - you can post questions here throughout the duration of the Featured Author Discussion at any time.

We are looking forward to the insightful questions and answers!

Hi Marc!

What would be the most important message that you would like the reader to take away with them after reading a book of yours?

Hello,

What advice would you give to others if you had one chance to give advice?

Hello Marc,

I am interested in the editorial side of your writing. In your opinion, what qualities contribute to an ideal editor?

Thanks for answering our questions!

Talia

Hi Mark,

Thanks for doing this! Can you let us know who you favourite author is? What about your favourite book? Have either influenced your writing in anyway?

Thanks for answering my question.

Adam

DigiWriting wrote: "Hi Marc!

What would be the most important message that you would like the reader to take away with them after reading a book of yours?"<

Hi 'Digi'!

I think the message I would most like to leave readers with is that there are an infinite number of different ways to tell a 'story'. Many of my short stories do not follow a conventional beginning, middle and end structure. For example I have a story made up entirely of endings. I've written a story with one hundred single word sentences all beginning with the letter 'C'. I've structured stories around radioactive chemical elements, bingo calls, the numbers of limbs (octopus 8, rowing crew 16, amputee war hero 1 etc). These structures invite the reader into the story in a different way and hopefully open up different ways of looking at what's being written about. I think if you read my short stories, the reader is very likely to still be thinking about elements long after they have finished reading it which I think is a good aim for a writer to strive for.

Iesha (In east shade house at...) wrote: "Hello,

What advice would you give to others if you had one chance to give advice?"

Hi Iesha,

I'm not sure if you mean advice to other writers or to readers? So I'll attempt to give an answer to both and hope that answers your question.

It's easier to give advice to fellow writers, as I don't think writers should be advising readers about anything! For writers, especially starting out and trying to gather information and tips, they are actually going to receive an awful lot of advice just because there's so much out there, online, books about writing, classes and the like. The problem is much of this information is actually quite contradictory so the writer is struggling to know which to trust and which to dismiss. Every writer is different, their writing process is unique to them, what they are seeking out of writing is different, so there is not going to be one size fits all in the information that is available. Therefore I would say that as long as writers ask themselves the questions 'why do I write?', 'what am I looking to get out of writing?', 'what does success/achievement look like to me?', 'what does being a writer mean to me?', answer all these to yourself and then stick to them when you come by information. Stick to your own writer's vision and then you are not tied down by any and all of the external information that is out there.

For readers, as I said I don't have any advice. Readers know what they like to read. Readers are smart and don't need any guidance. And readers are never wrong, if a reader doesn't enjoy my books, the fault is with me as a writer, not the reader. So all I would offer to readers follows on from my answer to Digi above, that there is a huge variety in the way writers tell stories and some of those are very different, very radical and I'm not sure writers of those types of stories are good at making people aware that these types of stories exist, because they are in the minority in the market place. But if you're curious or daring, you should check them out.

Talia wrote: "Hello Marc,

I am interested in the editorial side of your writing. In your opinion, what qualities contribute to an ideal editor?

Thanks for answering our questions!

Talia"

Writers these days have to collaborate with many different types of creative people, from video makers to book cover designers and the key is to allow these people room to bring their creative skills to play and not just credit that your vision of video trailer or cover design is the best. The same goes with editors. Give the editor space to bring their skills to your work.

I was lucky that i came from a background of writing stage plays before I moved to prose. I used to attend the rehearsals where I discovered that there were some words or lines that actors just couldn't deliver without laughing (actors call this 'corpsing') or they just reported that they didn't understand what the word or line was trying to do. Now you've already cast the play so you're not going to change your actor, instead you have to cut the line. Even if it's the best line in the whole play. Once you've had this experience as a writer, you realise that no word is sacred and anything can be cut. If you have this attitude with an editor, then there really is no conflict at all. I let the editors edit!

Adam wrote: "Hi Mark,

Thanks for doing this! Can you let us know who you favourite author is? What about your favourite book? Have either influenced your writing in anyway?

Thanks for answering my question.
..."

My favourite author is Franz Kafka and my writing is as far removed from his as you can get! His work is dreamlike, unsettling, and the mood veers from triumphant to despair in a few paragraphs. Nothing like my work at all! His short stories are masterful, with a real sense of menace in many of them, delivered with such economy.

Of contemporary writers I really like Ben Marcus. His short story collection Leaving the Sea: Stories is very good. After a fairly conventional starting set, he reverts to his radical and daring tales where he shakes language up in the rest and indicates how we take for granted language actually works to communicate (it does a rather poor job actually) and he shows this by making language communicate in very different ways where words and metaphors stand for things other than we are used to.

In my current collection Extra-Curricular two of my stories attempt to do something similar. In one called 'Perspective', an alien race armed only with human art criticism textbooks, attempt to describe a scene of street violence on earth using the language of fine art. In 'Life Class' an alien race describe the features and functions of the human face which is an alien landscape of its own to those unfamiliar with our anatomy.

In general I am not that influenced by writers because I'm looking to try and do stories in a different way from the mainstream. But I think inevitably there are always little bits of things from other writers that seep into you and influence your work in ways you may not even be aware of.

Hi Marc,

I have a question I often ask fellow writers: Do you have a specific writing process or do you plan your writing time? ie. do you fit your writing into the rest of your life or does your life revolve around your writing?

That's a really good question Amanda. I'm going to answer it in sections if that's okay?

Firstly I'm not a planner, so when I get an idea for a novel I'll let it stew for about 6 months and then when I sit down to write that first draft it consumes me for a month to 6 weeks when most other things in life except work get pushed aside (sometimes I use my annual leave for these periods so even work isn't a factor). I write for long stints, my sleep is disrupted, it's all about the momentum to get that first draft down. Then I can take my time with further drafts. Obviously it's a completely different thing with short stories, the lead-in time isn't so hard and fast and unless it's for a competition there's less time pressure.

So, I'm not a planner. Also I've been writing long enough now that I don't give myself a hard time if I'm not doing any writing for a period of time. I trust that it will come when it's ready. And that's the thing, when it comes, when you're in the middle of writing something, it can and does come to you at any time of the day. So I've written on buses, in the bath, in my work lunch hour, all sorts of places. So it's not quite a case of pushing things aside as fitting it in and around things, but yes writing has a very high priority in my life. My sleep often suffers because even when I've stopped a writing session, the brain is still whirring round on the project and takes a while to slow down and permit sleep.

Because I write so many short stories (I used to aim to produce 1 flash story {1000 words or less} a week), I am usually writing in short bursts these days. Even my current novel is a series of thematically linked short stories, so I'm just writing them as and when, often at weekends. The whole process seems to have become a lot less pressured, maybe that's an outcome of age and experience.

Thanks for the great question, I hope my answer made some sort of sense?

Thanks Marc! If you don't plan, then how do you figure out promotion or is that the same approach as writing for you?

Also, when you mention writing on lack of sleep, do you find some of the best work happens under pressure? Or does that not apply to you because you don't have a publication deadline?

A question we often ponder: How do you select the title for your books? Do they grow from your writing or do you have the title in mind before you start to write?

Amanda wrote: "Thanks Marc! If you don't plan, then how do you figure out promotion or is that the same approach as writing for you?"

For me it's always about the work. Getting it to answer the questions posed by it at the beginning. When I've typed the last period point, then I turn my thoughts to promotion! Not necessarily a recipe for success, but as I say, for me the work comes first.

Amanda wrote: "Also, when you mention writing on lack of sleep, do you find some of the best work happens under pressure? Or does that not apply to you because you don't have a publication deadline?"

When I'm tired, my resistance and inhibitions are lowered, so sometimes you can get really raw or emotional stuff. I can't really explain the processes as I don't know how they work, but my unconscious does a lot of work in writing and often I wake up with whole sections to write that have brewed in the night. I blogged on the subject of insomnia and creativity here if you're interested - http://sulcicollective.blogspot.co.uk...

Blue Moon wrote: "A question we often ponder: How do you select the title for your books? Do they grow from your writing or do you have the title in mind before you start to write?"

It can vary from project to project. Titles are really important to me (plus how they appear on the cover as part of the whole image, rather than just 'stamped' across it).

One of my novels emerged from the title. Others change throughout the course of writing it and one or two have been virtually the last thing to complete the book because it kept changing. Finding a title for short stories is quite tough,e specially if they're not themed together as a whole which mine tend not to be. Deciding on the order of stories in a collection is also tough and it was the difficulty of that for my current collection that actually led me to finding both a structure and a title for it. It's 44 (45 in the print version) stories organised by theme, the themes relating to school subjects, so there are 4 stories under the heading "Physics", 3 under "English Literature", 4 under "Politics", 4 under "Psychology" and so on. That then led me to the title "Extra-Curricular". All that happened after I'd written all the stories, so quite late in the process.

Thanks Marc. Speaking of titles, if someone were new to your writing, which book would you start them off with and why?

if you have a Kindle I'd say 52FF which is a book of flash (very short) tales.

If you only read print books, I'd say either of my last 2 flash fiction collections, Extra-Curricular or 28 Far Cries

Hi Marc,

As a fellow author, I often like to ask other authors if you find the writing process (first draft to finished manuscript) engaging or frustrating? I recently finished my first book and it was not an easy process. If you do get frustrated, how do you overcome this?

I love it, I wouldn't do it if I didn't. I wouldn't forego nights out to stay at home and write if it wasn't inherently pleasurable. Are there periods of frustration? Sure. But they are short-lived.

It goes back to one of my earlier answers here. What does being a writer mean to you? What makes you sit down to write night after night, week after week? It can't be a masochistic act, so there must be something pleasurable in it.

I don't know what you write, but for me every story no matter what length from 1000 word flash to a full novel, starts as a series of challenges and questions around its central ideas. The writing process seeks to answer these artistic, intellectual and linguistic questions and challenges as you go deeper into the work. Sometimes you hit a roadblock, but eventually if the premise is strong, you find a solution and overcome the barrier. The only problem is if the starting idea turns out not to be strong enough and you can't sustain it as a project. That's happened to me, but fortunately I have other ideas I just turn to (I abandoned a scifi work at 40,000 words because I couldn't solve its challenges. The very next day I turned back to one of my older scifi projects, because working on the first one had given me ideas to unblock this one and I ended up with a completed novel now published).

The playwright Sam Shepard says he writes the first 15 pages of any idea and then sits back to judge if he can write it all the way to an end, or whether the idea doesn't have legs and he abandons it. I think this comes with experience.

Now that you've written a book through from starting germ of an idea all the way through to the last period point, you've gone through the whole process. Next time round it can't hold any fears because you know you've done it before. You know what it involves. It won't grind you down. Will there be frustrations in the second novel? More than likely. Will they stop you? No, because you know they didn't get the better of you with your first book. Those frustrations are also likely to get shorter and shorter in duration as you write more.

Good luck with the book!

Marc, very helpful answers in the discussion today! While other writers may still check in tonight, we wanted to check in with you on one more thought: What work was your favorite story to write and why?

Thanks again for an interesting discussion!

the simple answer to that is the work I'm currently working on! That's when you're filled with excitement and duelling with the work and it gets the adrenaline going.

But if you mean which of my published work is my favourite, I find it really hard to answer that. Each work held its own unique challenges and solving them in the writing holds a special place for me. But if I had to pick one, it's a really short piece of 250 words I wrote really quickly and which ended up in my second flash fiction collection. I had it made into a video and you can watch it here -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6pFw...

It may not have been my favourite to write because it came really quickly, but I love reading it live and seeing it in this video form is really exciting as it offers a different way of telling a story.

guys thanks for having me today. It's midnight 30 here in the Uk so I'm off to bed. But if you post any more questions here because it's still Wednesday where you live, I'll make sure I answer them tomorrow my time.

Thanks again

bests

marc