“I'm a firm believer that the mechanism of writing behaves like any muscle; if you exercise it, and train it with the intent to make it stronger, you'll be able to do so.”

“If something I do imagine in a story does become reality, I only hope that I'm around to see it. If it pays me dividends, that would be even better.”

June 26, 2008

During Poetry Writing Month (April) of this year, I interviewed four poets. The experience was so much fun and the results so rewarding that I decided to come back to interviewing. Expect to find an interview every month.

This month, I spoke with *SRSmith. You might also know him as Stephen R Smith, staff member of 365 tomorrows, an online collaborative project that publishes a piece of sci-fi/speculative flash fiction everyday. His profile on the website describes him as the “founder of a successful consulting and web development company, and an avid programmer and technophile”. Oh, and he writes in “either the language of men, or that of machines.” That should give you a clue about the kind of writer Steve is.

Stephen has been a member of deviantART since December 2005, has received two Daily Deviations, and is generally known to be a great guy. Earlier this year, he hosted a contest for deviantART writers, and the winners were published in 365 tomorrows.

In this article, he talks about his writing, science/speculative fiction, flash fiction and his various writing projects.

^lovetodeviate: Tell us about your writing trajectory. How have you progressed as a writer?

Stephen R Smith: I'd made a number of half-hearted attempts over the years to write, and for one reason or another not stuck with it. I'm a firm believer that the mechanism of writing behaves like any muscle; if you exercise it, and train it with the intent to make it stronger, you'll be able to do so. Conversely, if you expect that it will just one day have developed on its own, or are content to let it atrophy between uncommitted spurts, you'll never develop any ability you may have. One of my biggest challenges was trying to write long pieces before I'd mastered short ones. Kind of like trying to play Beethoven before learning scales. When I first found 365 tomorrows, shortly after it started publishing flash fiction in 2005, I realized that I'd found a format that satisfied both my need for writing complete stories, and my requirement for a compact format I could focus on. I warmed up writing pieces based on existing characters and plot lines, or variant themes from stories the first year staff writers published on 365 and then quickly started developing stories of my own. I earned myself a staff spot for the second year of 365, and we're now nearing the start of our fourth year, so things look good for me writing continually for the foreseeable future.

LTD: Can you tell us a little about your writing process? Do you revise a lot or do a couple of drafts suffice to come up with a “finished” story?

SRS: I write stories in rough entirely in my head, usually while I'm showering, or driving or doing anything else that affords me quiet time to think. The plot line, characters and key elements of dialog all gel, sometimes in an hour, sometimes over several days or even weeks before I commit them to anything permanent. Some story ideas just don't feel right the first time, and I'll file the basic premise away and often will have written several other stories before I come back and find a way to get the first idea out in a form I'm happy with.

Once I've got an idea fleshed out, I will usually know when I'm ready to write it down. I usually write at night, when everyone else is asleep (like I'm doing right now). When the time is right, the story just flows, and while I'm writing I fill in all the other detail until I've got a complete piece. From there, I edit obsessively until I run out of things to improve upon, and then I put the piece away, usually sleep on it and then reread it a day or so later and edit it some more. At some point, I run out of things that I feel I need to improve, and then I turn it loose. Even after it's released on dA and 365, I find myself coming back several times and making minor adjustments to it, sometimes based on feedback I get, sometimes just to satisfy myself that I've done the best that I can do at that moment. Once I've started writing something new though, I almost never go back to what I've written before.

LTD: Do you have a favourite prose piece online that we can read? Tell us about it and how it came to be.

SRS: My favourites change from time to time, but I think ‘Holly’ is one that I still have a soft spot for. It's not the most exciting, stories like ' Phyx' or 'Runner' are much more action orientated, but this one looks at one of my favourite themes, that of people being uplifted into the machine world, and how that will play out. We could talk all night about whether the essence of a person could make the transition from the flesh into a computer construct, how our concept of the 'soul' could manifest itself there, but I like the feeling of this, and the interaction between the two characters.

I can't remember exactly the circumstances that set this in motion, but there have been a few friends of mine who have lost their partners early in their relationships, and I wondered how things would be different if you could vacate your flesh before it died and persist in some sort of electronic form. Would you be selfish and want your partner to live as though you were still there, or would you want them to get on with their life with another living person, and where then would you go? Would there still be a place for you once your partner had moved on? What would our loved ones want, and would they choose for themselves what you would choose for them? The entire subject fascinates me, and you'll find it's a theme that comes up again and again in my writing.

LTD: Who would you say are your influences?

SRS: I find I'm influenced by everything I've read, everyone I've met and talked to, every movie I've ever seen and every artist whose music and lyrics I've been exposed to. That might sound a bit broad and vague, but it's true. I spend a great deal of my time listening, and watching, letting all of the things I experience accumulate and percolate until something triggers an idea or series of ideas and a story comes out of it. Characters form from people I've met, or sometimes just seen on the street. They get mixed with the rhythm of a song that I feel suits them, some people just have a sound that feels right with them. Dialogue comes from snippets of conversation I hear, or dialects that I stumble upon. My heads become a giant melting pot of material; everything goes in, and nothing comes out unaffected by everything that's gone in with it.

As far as more traditional literary influences, I'd say Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling have had the most impact on my Science Fiction writing, but Robert Ludlum, Len Deighton and Tom Clancy have added an entirely different set of sensibilities, as have Ian Rankin and Douglas Adams. Add to those Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello, two of my all time favourite lyricists, and I think that's the shortest of what could be a very long list if I kept going.



LTD: You have a particular interest in flash fiction. The 365 tomorrows website calls it “the next frontier in writing”. Can you explain why you (and your team) think so? Also, do tell us more about the project?

SRS: I've always believed that people enjoy reading, and that as we get more and more engaged in the everyday business of today, and right now, it becomes that much more important to get away for a break. Books and magazines, and the stories they contain have always been a fantastic method of escape. What has changed is our pace of living, and it's getting harder and harder for people to carve out the time it takes to read entire novels. What we do have are lots of short moments where we're waiting with nothing else to do for a few minutes, and wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a way we could squeeze a short story into that free moment without feeling like we were being taken away from it when our time was up? Flash fiction fits that need perfectly. The stories are complete and self contained, and very short. You can read one in a few minutes and get back to your day. People can discuss them easily, as it only takes a few minutes to read one, so if you comment on one to a friend, if they haven't read it they can in just a few moments, making them ideal conversation points. They also, if done well, give people an idea to mull over for the rest of the day, which helps exercise our brains in a way that I think is far more healthy simply being focused on work all the time.

365 tomorrows was conceived by Kathy Kachelries while waiting at a stop light. She recognized a need for short, short SciFi and collected a talented group of writers to help her fill that void. 365 was a staff only site in its first year, with five writers producing 365 unique visions of the future, one new story each day. I joined in the second year, and we opened the site up for submissions. The now six staff writers produce on average three stories each a month, with the remaining days filled with stories we've selected from submissions we receive from all over the world. It's incredible to see the reach we've been able to get, and to get feedback and viewpoints from around the globe. It's also a wonderful feeling to enable talented writers to reach a worldwide audience and get their stories out. I'm incredibly proud of what 365 tomorrows has become, and I'm hoping we can push it farther in the future.

LTD: What tips would you give someone who is new to flash fiction and wants to try it out?

SRS: I'd suggest reading a handful of stories to get a sense of what you can reasonably expect to accomplish in 600 words, and then just write some and see how it goes. Kathy Kachelries advised me early on to "cut out all of what you don't need, and half of what you do." It's easy to try to over write for the format, what's hard is letting go of words you felt good about writing, and feel bad about not including. Flash is about making every word count, so it's important to write with that in mind. When I started, most of my stories began at 1,500 words, and I'd edit them mercilessly until they reached 700 words or so. By that point, I'd focused entirely on making the story shorter, not on making it better, and looking back I think that shows. Now I write almost exactly to 600 words the first time, then spend all my time editing to make the story better, and I hope that's evident too.

I think the best advice is to try it, and don't be upset if the first handful don't quite do what you hoped they would. Just persevere and it will come with practice. I think that if I focus on writing extremely densely packed stories of 600 words now, those skills will make my 6000 word stories that much more engaging, as I'll have learned not to waste a single word, no matter how many I've got to work with.

LTD: 365 tomorrows publishes only science/speculative fiction. Was there a reason for this?

SRS: There needed to be some common thread to the stories, and as all the original writers like SciFi, it was only natural that they'd pick that as the theme. The idea was to write 365 possible tomorrows, which by definition are possible futures.

LTD: Often, people can be dismissive of science fiction. Even though the sci-fi audience (both for books and movies) is huge, some don’t consider it as “literary” enough. Is this a problem for many SF writers?

SRS: That's a good question. I can fully appreciate that there are people who like SciFi, and people that don't. I'm writing for those that do, and satisfying those readers is my only concern. I like other forms of fiction as well, and I think there are fantastic examples of SciFi blending nicely with more conventional fiction; William Gibson's 'Spook Country' being a great example, and Neal Stephenson's 'Cryptonomicon'. I think these are both fantastic books that will bring non-SciFi readers to the table and make them realize the genre isn't all ray guns and rocket ships.

Science Fiction writers have always looked towards current and future technologies with a critical eye, and I think they've provided a great deal of invaluable insight into the potential impact of these technologies. SciFi writers also imagine what the world could be, and that in a lot of ways I think provides inspiration for those that work to create these imagined realities.

LTD: Voices of Tomorrow and Soundzine are “sound” publications, if you will. What can you tell us about them?

SRS: Voices of Tomorrow is the podcast companion to 365 tomorrows, where selected stories are turned into mini radio plays. JR.Blackwell pioneered our foray into podcasting with her partner, Jared Axelrod, himself an established podcaster. I love creating them when I've got time, and we've had a number of readers provide their own productions of our stories, which has been a fantastic thing for us. I love listening to someone else interpret our stories, and we've got some very talented people that have become involved with it. They are a lot of fun to produce, though they can also be a great deal of work. Soundzine is produced to bring a wider variety of literature to a similar radio play format. It's produced by Salli Shepherd, Charles Musser, and Phill English, with me providing technical assistance and the occasional vocal.



Special guest question: Do you ever find yourself unable to imagine the future? Do you think that people will look back one day like they do with Asimov and wonder how you imagined the future so precisely? -- ~apocathary

SRS: I can always imagine a future, but obviously I have no idea whether it's a future that will come to pass. If you follow trends, and developments in science and other fields, you can start to project things into the future, and fabricate possible paths that development will take. It's difficult to imagine beyond everything we know now, but taking something we do know and extrapolating it to a logical conclusion at some foreseeable point in the future isn't something I find I struggle with. I think that some of the things I write about will come to pass, just because I think they are logical extensions to the world we live in now. There are some things that my twisted mind comes up with that I hope don't ever become part of anyone’s reality, but that certainly won't stop me from imagining them in great detail. If something I do imagine in a story does become reality, I only hope that I'm around to see it. If it pays me dividends, that would be even better.

LTD: Who do you read on dA? Can you mention your favourite SF/flash fiction writers here?

SRS: ~sovegna-vos aka. Kathy Kachelries is one of my favourite writers, though she's not very active on dA anymore I do get to read her work directly, and ~hrekka - Sam Clough, also a 365 staff writer. I find that when I'm reading, I'm not writing, so I'm afraid I've had to scale back on how much I read online. I usually try to pick something at random and provide some sort of meaningful and hopefully valuable feedback on it, but the writers that I would have pointed to even six months ago have since moved on to other things, and aren't active on dA anymore. Reviewing submissions to 365 is also a big part of my responsibility, so I'm reading a lot there, a number of which have come from dA members. With a little luck, there will soon be a new crop of Flash Fiction writers here that will make themselves known, and I'll have no end of good material to read.


LTD: What are your plans for the future?

SRS: I'm working on longer short stories that I'm hoping to get accepted by some of the traditional SciFi print publications, and once I'm satisfied with my performance there I've got a full length novel forming gradually in my head. That's my ultimate goal, to have a novel written, and hopefully to see it in print.

Thank you for letting me interview you, Steve, and good luck in all that you do!

Helpful links

SRSmith’s deviantART gallery
What is flash fiction?
365 tomorrows
Voices of Tomorrow
Soundzine

Up next

In July, I will be interviewing *MSJames. Yes, that's Mr Haikuwrimo. (And by the way, plans for Summer Haikuwrimo have already been made. You should go join in.)

If you would like to ask *MSJames a question, please note me with it. I will pick the most creative and interesting question(s) for the interview (with due credit, of course). Remember that I will be asking Mike about his favourite writers, his influences and suchlike, so think of something out-of-the-box when/if you note me.

Cheers all!

-- ^lovetodeviate