Today we have a little Q&A session with author, poet and editor A. Victoria Mixon. Her latest book 'The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner's Manual' is a must read for writers, both aspiring and professional. As promised we've kept a few juicy details especially for subscribers.
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| The pretty face behind the fantastic advice |
You know, I’m like everyone else, I think—I started writing as a child. I can’t remember why. I remember a particular day when I was young, standing in front of my uncle’s wall of bookshelves full of dime store paperbacks. I think that’s where I got my love of vintage pulp.
My parents are readers. My grandparents, aunts, and uncles—even my farmer grandfather read in his spare time. I remember certain parts of my childhood for the books my mother and aunt were reading. I can hear my mother’s voice quite clearly in my head talking about certain books, about what she thought worked and what didn’t. She took it all very seriously as a matter of course. Fiction was simply a part of life.
I write now because it’s how I think of myself—as a writer. I have spent my life learning this craft, living in the world of books. I have an enormous, truly almost crippling reverence for them. And I love almost everything about their world.
We are standing on the brink of something very big, very creative, very extraordinary. Our children will look back on this era as the beginning of the renaissance of beautiful mainstream literature (after quite a serious drought, I must say).
How does the quality of material that comes out of India compare to the international standard?
I do wonder sometimes if their total immersion in their storytelling comes from a culture of storytelling. Americans are deadened by television and their own rather tenuous connections to American folk culture, so they run the risk of approaching their work in quite a shallow way. Many of them think shallowness is their folk culture. But writers of less industrialized cultures very often have a strong sense of what storytelling really is. Their cultural storytelling is closer to their lives, to the way they were brought up, embedded in their psyches.
The South Americans took us all by surprise thirty years ago. Koreans and Indians are on the forefront right now. I would love to see more work coming directly from the less industrialized world, particularly now that the globalization of the Internet is breaking down the cultural barriers that once made people unable to relate to stories of other cultures.
What will it take for an Indian author to be recognized more as an author and less as an Indian?
That’s interesting, because one of my Indian writers is not, in fact, writing about India or being Indian. She’s a teacher in the American Midwest, so she’s writing magical children’s adventure books about Midwestern children. I think what’s happening is that, right now, the American publishing industry doesn’t know how to handle writers from other cultures without pigeon-holing them for their cultures. That is going away as more and more people of other cultures enter American mainstream life. But right now my client in the Midwest is on the forefront of that. And it’s writers like her who are going to carve out a place in mainstream American fiction for Indians to write whatever they like, to be writers before being noticed for being Indians.
You know, we watch a lot of Marx Brothers at our house—my son privately believes he’s Harpo. And it’s quite clear in what they did, how they brought vaudeville to the screen, that their popularity was very much about speaking for the immigrant population: Germans, Italians, Jews, people who didn’t speak English, who felt they had no voices, and the humor in all that potential for misunderstanding. We’re in another massive wave of immigration right now. The computer industry is pouring people across national and cultural boundaries in search of work, particularly in and out of India. And it’s fascinating! I’d love to see an art form like vaudeville revived, a flamboyant exploration of the confusion and chaos and, ultimately, humor such cultural mish-mash engenders. I think it will be—whether or not its creators realize that their creative roots lie in vaudeville.
Is it possible to be ‘taught’ to be a good writer?
It must be. I was taught. You should see some of the stuff I’ve produced—I take heart with every new unpublished client when I compare their work to my own early work. It makes them look like geniuses.
I absolutely do not subscribe to the theory that you must be born a writer in order to be good at it. That’s unadulterated nonsense promoted by people who don’t understand how they learned to write and, possibly, have a higher opinion of their skills than those actually warrant. Raymond Chandler, one of the greatest twentieth-century stylists of the English language, was an oil company executive. By all accounts, he was born to be a bookkeeper.
If you want to be a writer, learn how to do it. If you don’t enjoy doing what writers do, then don’t do it. There is no law that you must become a writer. People write because they love the world of writing.
Can you give us a few writing tips that all writers should follow.
Don’t show us stuff that applies to everybody. We don’t need to know that they’re always walking in and out of rooms or wearing brand name clothes or looking like the people in ads. We need to know what’s individual about them—that one has a mole on their upper lip, or one picks at their thumbnail when they’re nervous, or one can’t answer a straight question. We need to know why they are unique in the same way that every single person on earth is unique.
This is something that’s easier for writers from cultures not commonly shown on American television, because the details of their daily lives—the things they all know about and take for granted—are quite telling details to the rest of us. Those of us whose lives are already represented all over the place in cliché pastiche have a harder time digging unique details out of them. So, Indian writers—take advantage of that!
Write what you know. When an Indian living in India writes about the people of India, they’re recording their own first-hand impressions of real, unique individuals. When an Indian writes about the inner workings of Indian families, they’re recording their own experiences of how families operate. And when they write about crossing cultures—India to Britain, for instance, or India to the US—they’re writing about a world many, many, many people know in their bones. Use this, if you’ve got it. Use your life.
Also, learn to plot. Please, guys. The basic concepts are so easy, and they’re essential. I devoted the bulk of my book on writing to teaching you how to do it, and in rather general terms at that. I’ll teach you more complex stuff in the sequel.
An intriguing plot that goes somewhere significant in a structured way—characters who look and speak and act uniquely in a world of telling details. That’s fiction.
Can you give us a ballpark figure of your charges as an editor? How would you like potential clients to get in touch with you?
I can give you very specific figures for my charges—they’re all on my webpage on rates. I believe in putting that stuff out there. You don’t have to contact me in order to find out whether or not you can afford me. That’s your business.
I’m on the cheap end for in-depth developmental and line editing, because I truly believe in this new wave of fiction breaking through the stonewall of traditional publishing, and I was a starving writer for too long not to ache for dedicated writers who can’t afford the editing everyone needs.
The thing is it’s always been in the thousands to do a whole novel right, to make it really the best it can possibly be, and these days the writer is the one who shoulders that burden. Big publishers have set their sights on profit over quality and dumped the expense of quality on the writer. The luxury age of the great editors who spent their days nurturing writers and their manuscripts on the publisher’s nickel is simply gone.
I do see a change in the past year in dedicated writers accepting that this is just the way it is. It’s rough, and I am sorry—but I’m glad an editor who actually edits isn’t required to live in New York anymore.
I try to make it easy to contact me. I have a Contact button on my banner, contact links on my Editing Services pages, and of course there’s my blog and advice column. You can always just leave me a comment. I’ll get it.
I want you guys to succeed! I do, from the bottom of my heart. I want your novels to be the most wonderful novels they can possibly be. Otherwise all my flap about us teetering on the brink of a renaissance is going to sound right silly, isn’t it?
Subscribers got a special bonus: Victoria answered questions on the biggest misconceptions among youngsters who enter the industry, style v/s content and 5 must reads for all authors, and we had them delivered to the convenience of their inbox.
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