"As soon as I put a great book down I want to go and write it, not even stopping to think that it's already been written."

"... it takes a bit of experimentation to discover what sort of technique you need to use for each piece you write."

"In my experience I think it takes a lot of willpower to be a writer in today's world."

January 24, 2009

Phillip English/=apocathary has been on deviantART since October, 2004. An admired prose writer and member of this community, Phill has hosted various projects and contests (notably =Wordspill and The Ugly Contest), and is always ready to support literary activities. Phill is also the fiction editor at Soundzine.

In the interview, Phill talks about his experience with writing, travelling and publishing, and his project, =Wordspill.



^lovetodeviate: Let's start from the beginning: when did you start writing and how have you changed through the years?

Phillip English: Well, I guess I first started trying to express myself and my ideas through writing the same time most people do: when I was in English class at high school. So that would be approximately eight years ago (wow, that time goes fast). It was more of a way of dealing with the pressures that we all face in that troubling period than anything with real literary value. I vividly remember reciting the line 'I will escape this prison of life’ to my classmates and not feeling the least bit ashamed, so you can guess at the general theme of my writing back then.

In the last years of high school and first few years of university I didn't really write anything creative, and it wasn't until three or four years ago that I started thinking a lot more about my creative writing and how to improve it. That was about the time the literature scene at deviantART caught my interest and I started getting involved with the myriad characters that ran wild within its domain.

I don't think I've changed a huge amount during the years as a writer. For example, I still cringe whenever I'm forced to refer to myself as a writer. My writing has probably improved a bit, although annoyingly I've retained my tendency to over-complicate things to the point of completely obscuring the intent of a story. I still like a sting in the tail and I still enjoy constructing the hook of the first sentence. I've read a lot, and as a result of that I have learned that there are no rules; or that there are rules, but they are written in ink that shifts and fades when exposed to thought. I've also learned that for me, nothing good comes out of my fingertips without a lot of thought. I used to think that with enough practise I'd just be able to sit down and glorious prose would flood out of me, but that's just not a reality.

LTD: Have there been important influences (people you've met, books you've read, events in your life, etc) that have changed the way you write?

PE: It depends on what you mean by 'important'. Every person I talk to, every place I go, every book I read influences me to a lesser or greater degree. Books, as a lot of my close friends know, always make me crazy in this way. As soon as I put a great book down I want to go and write it, not even stopping to think that it's already been written. I suppose I take some of my major influence from the stories I loved as a kid. Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton are still two of my most treasured authors, and I read them again and again in order to learn more about good story crafting. I'm still reading widely though, one book at a time and never really sticking to more than one book from one author. As a result of that I haven't had time to develop a set of authors that I definitely take influence from and admire all the work of.

Heh, I guess you could say that one of my more interesting influences is my closest friend Cian, who has always supported me in any creative outlet I've given a shot. In fact for my 21st birthday she stood for three hours in soaking London rain in order to explain my lack of confidence in my writing to Mr. Neil Gaiman and ask for some sort of encouraging note to be written in a volume of The Sandman. When I got the volume there was a sketch of Dream himself issuing me the simple command to 'Write'. Can't say no to that (:

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

PE: To be honest, not really. Some people were probably expecting me to mention my short story 'Toilet Paper', which won me a few fans here at dA, but I enjoy reading back my flash fictions more than reading Marty. I haven't edited TP at all since I wrote it and I really cringe when I read some of the sentences in it.

Flash fictions tend to come about from my daydreaming, so maybe that's why I like them so much. It's an outcome of playing the 'what-if' game, which is something we tend to miss out on doing when we graduate from children to adults. I'm lucky in that I still get to play the what-if game as a scientist, even if it is sometimes blocked by the 'what-for?' of time and money budgets. If I were to pick one out of the four flash fictions that have been published, I'd go with 'Good Evening, Mr. Staden'.

LTD: Does your research work in chemistry affect your writing? Are you planning to bring more science into your fiction?

PE: It does affect it yes, in many different ways. Scientific writing – that is, the writing style used to write reports on scientific topics – requires a very large distance between the author and the work being described. It uses passive voice and a lot of different language to what I would use in my more creative efforts. So I have to be quite careful not to fall into that scientific mode of writing, else I'd lose readers at the first sentence!

Science infiltrates my writing process in that I have a very logical train of thought when trying to put an idea into words. I'm not a person who can easily construct beautiful flowing passages of meaning that sound a lot like poetry. That sort of writing is in vogue at the moment, the prose-poets, but unfortunately I just can't join their ranks. I need solid images and meaning in my writing or I can't bring myself to expect someone else will be able to understand it. As far as bringing more science into my fiction, I occasionally have an idea containing a lot of hard science that usually ends up at Steve Smith's excellent 365tomorrows in the form of flash fiction. Maybe one day I'll write something a little longer that contains a bit more of my scientific background, but it would most likely end up being about scientists and their eccentric personalities rather than being a science fiction.



LTD: Your project, =Wordspill, prescribes a fun way to write involving blind writing and multiple revisions. Is this how you always write? Do different ideas demand different methods? Or does one method work for you every time?

PE: I don't think I've developed a particular method of writing yet. I've never been one to plan extensively but then I've never been one to write longer works, so I haven't ever really needed to. I don't use blind writing regularly, I prefer to start with an idea, sketch out a few quick paragraphs questioning myself and my motives and then once I've got a reasonable shape of the whole I go for it. I've found this works relatively well for short stories, but if I were to ever start writing a novel I'd have to plan a lot more than I do at the moment, or else I'd never keep the structure of everything in my head while I dealt with my day job and other commitments.

Poetry (and this is your forte, not mine so forgive me if I am completely off-base) seems to require a lot more consideration. A lot more internal inspiration rather than external stimulus in the creation of good ideas. The few times I've tried writing poetry I've found myself trying to bang it out at a similar speed as a short story and, predictably, that doesn't work. Once I'd calmed down and given myself some time to think about how I was constructing each line, the words used, etc. it came a lot easier.

I guess it takes a bit of experimentation to discover what sort of technique you need to use for each piece you write.

LTD: Tell us more about =Wordspill and what you plan to achieve with it?

PE: =Wordspill is an outshoot of two ideas, the first of which is the idea that a lot of people that participate in the dA writing community aren't full-time writers. They're people that work jobs, study things other than writing, or have commitments that prevent them dedicating hours to getting a story just right. =Wordspill helps people like this to just sit down and hammer out an idea within the limits of time they may have. In this capacity it's a good way of keeping up the practise of coming up with ideas and forming them into a coherent story.

The second idea behind =Wordspill was that I had often found myself sitting down to write out an idea, but would self-edit so heavily that I'd never get the idea out onto the page. I'd be revising before I'd even finished a sentence! =Wordspill solves this problem by asking the participant to put away the self-editor for 10 minutes and just go hell for leather.

What I wanted to achieve with =Wordspill was an activity that people could use as a foundation for more concrete creative expressions. Each time a participant completes a =Wordspill they have another idea they can work on in the future. And the regular scheduling of it helps to build up a confidence. It's something they can point to and say, "Hey, I've done that every week for a month. I wonder what else I could achieve if I put my mind to it?" It's not intended to result in the production of great works directly, but rather to establish and encourage a snowball effect that might result in something really good being written much further down the road.



LTD: Recently you toured Europe for a month and a half. Has this experience affected your writing and/or the way you think of the world? How important do you think travel is for the writer?

PE: I believe travel is as important for writing as it is for anything else. For me it provided perspective on aspects of my life that weren't what I wanted them to be, and (on one memorable evening in London) allowed me to sit down and be honest with myself about some things that I want to change. So in that regard travel can benefit writing by giving you a perspective to your world that you wouldn't otherwise be able to experience; it can surprise you.

Travel can also be a huge source of inspiration for people in all aspects of the arts. Being in another land can result in a great culture shock, and within that shock you might find yourself thinking of things you'd never have considered before. On the other hand I think that travel as a way of coming up with ideas is not something that I personally really need to do. Most of my ideas are prompted by items so mundane or common that there's no need for me to travel to far-off exotic places to experience them. That said, I've definitely been bitten by a travel bug on this trip, and we're already planning our next holiday. Maybe to somewhere a bit warmer this time!

LTD: Having been a writer for some years, been part of writing communities, been awarded Daily Deviations for your work, you are an experienced and talented writer. What do you think it takes to be a writer in today's world?

PE: Hah, What a flattering question! In my experience I think it takes a lot of willpower to be a writer in today's world. My own (very much continuing) journey to become a writer has been plagued by my weak control over being distracted by shiny things. There are a whole lot of distractions for the unwary or the weak, and it is very easy to become caught up with them and make excuses for the putting aside of heartfelt promises to yourself to write a story or poem. Western culture today is very much entertainment driven, so something that requires hard work and focus can find itself subsumed by flashy graphics or a well-placed lolcat.

But don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that writers should block themselves off from the world and try their level best not to fall prey to fun. The creative written word would be boring as batshit if that were the case. But rather that to be a writer, just like any other creative profession, requires being able to have the willpower to attend to your own promises and make them reality.

An honourable mention should also go to being a reader. I'd say that reading often, both critically and for fun, gives you a headstart that nothing else can match.

LTD: Tell us about Soundzine and what you do there.

PE: Soundzine is an online magazine dedicated to spreading the joy that is hearing an author read their own work. It was started in 2007 by Sal (=salshep) and Charles (*Adeimantus) and continues to go from strength to strength. We recently had a poetry contest that garnered a whole heap of entries that have given the judges headaches in choosing the winner, the results of which will be announced in the next issue that launches on February the 1st.

I've been the prose editor there since issue 5, although I've not been so much involved in the last issue as a result of my trip. We don't get an awful lot of unsolicited prose submitted to us, so my job is to scour the darkened halls of deviantART to find great prose for us to host. Given how big the prose section is on dA that's kind of a tough job, but every now and again I get rewarded with a couple of real gem finds. I'm also on call as a staff reader, so any time they need a twenty-something, male, Australian voice to record something I'm there! Needless to say, they don't need me that often...

Seriously though, we encourage anyone to send in their work to us. We read everything and there's a good chance that if your work is up to scratch we'll include you. Or, if we can recognise that you've got potential we might ask you to write to a future theme and help you edit until your piece shines! We're good people, honest!

LTD: Besides Soundzine, what is your experience with the publishing world? Do you have any advice for beginners?

PE: To be honest I haven't had much experience in submitting pieces to places to be published. I've only ever sent out two pieces (one of which got published, so I guess that's a relatively good record so far!) so I can't give a whole heck of a lot of advice. I guess the best thing I can recommend is to just do your research before you send your pieces out. Some magazines have a definite style that they prefer to publish and you can save yourself a lot of heartache and rejections by finding places that suit your writing. You can do this either by subscribing to them for a couple of issues or checking out their online sections. Also, keep an eye out for youth-based magazines, as they are often funded by government initiatives and tend to give better feedback on your piece than those that aren't.

Editing is important obviously, as there are very few places that won't outright reject a piece that has spelling and grammatical errors. Training yourself to be good at self-editing is a hard process, but you can learn a lot by critiquing other people's work. Drawer time is a very effective technique, and I encourage people that are working non-stop on a piece and can't get their heads around it to just put it away for a spell and come back to it in a week or so. Not too long, or you can lose the headspace you were in when you initially had the idea.

I also wrote a brief, very slightly satirical introduction to deviantART literature a while back that I've re-uploaded for people to have a look at if they feel like it might help them.



Special guest question: "We're all very familiar with your prose and strong narrative voice, as well as seen your earlier poetry begin to flourish; do you have any plans to foray into other forms as well, such as scriptwriting or longer fictions?" – =Negated

LTD: Flattery again! Heh, it's funny you should ask that. I've recently begun reimagining an old attempt at a novel, and I think the new version has good potential to become a novel. I'm excited for it but also a bit wary of rushing things; I don't want to push it too hard and lose motivation when I can't fulfill my own high expectations. I've given myself a soft deadline of the end of the year to have it half-finished. Of course I've also got my thesis to think of (due the start of next year!) so chances are it will take a bit longer than I would like. Fingers crossed!

In the past I've attempted to write a comic script with another deviant here on dA, but it fell through. I think mainly because there was an awful lot of distance between us (Canada vs. Australia) and although the internet can do a lot of things, it can't communicate the immediacy and enthusiasm required to get a project like that off the ground. I was also probably complicating things with my vision of a grand story arc. Still, there's 14 pages written already so maybe one day we can have another go at it.

Thank you, Phill , for being part of my interview series! Good luck with all that you plan to do. Thanks also to =Negated for contributing questions and being supportive.

Helpful links

Phillip's blog
Phillip's gallery
Soundzine
=Wordspill