Author Interview: Christopher Barzak

Today we bring to you the interview with one of my favourite authors. One of Christopher’s books – Wonders of the Invisible World – is honest to god in my all time personal top five. And to showcase just how gay I get about it, let me just say: I annotated my copy the last time I re-read it & this winter gifted it to my best friend when we went to Paris together.

So to say I was really excited when Christopher agreed to email us his answers, is a bit of an understatement… Read on to find out what he had to say about inspiration, how music doesn’t always help you write but experience sure does, and more (and more)!

Let’s start at the beginning. How did you first get into writing?

I’ve been writing since I was a small child. Before I could spell, I would draw sequential stories through pictures. Once I learned how to spell, I stopped drawing and began writing small stories. I wish I’d kept up drawing, too, because now I have very little ability to draw, and sometimes I’d love to sketch something out, but the only way I can do that is in words now.

What are your favourite genres to read and write?

I love to read any sort of genre, as long as the writing is good and the characters and storyline are complex. Or as long as the writer brings a new perspective or approach to something familiar. But I suppose I love magical realist and supernatural stories the best, if I had to choose. I’ve always been enamored with magic being depicted amid the ordinariness of life.

And are there any genres or tropes you wouldn’t write?

I probably wouldn’t write a western or crime fiction. They tend to be at the bottom of what interests me to read, genre-wise, so it’s unlikely I’d write in those realms too. I have learned, however, to never say never.

How do you get inspiration for your books?

Everywhere, really. Dreams, snatches of passing conversation amid strangers, from other writers and their stories, from movies and music and art. Anything in the world might inspire me. I don’t have a particular source, but many sources. Anything that I may experience might plant a seed in my imagination.

Do you have a writing playlist? And if you do, does it focus more on the lyrics or melodies, vibe of the songs?

I don’t listen to music while I write, mainly because I feel like I can’t hear the voice of the story over the music. I end up listening to the lyrics and voices of the musicians, and not the characters I’m trying to capture.

What’s your writing process? At what point do you let other people read your drafts and who are they?

I tend to start with a general concept for a story, and with a voice in mind. I like to decide ahead of time what tense and what perspective I’ll write in, and I like to know the end I’m heading toward. This is entirely opposite from how I wrote when I started writing, which twenty years ago was more of a process of discovery. I feel that my writing process twenty years ago was in a mode of discovery because I was still in a major mode of discovery in life in general, and learning how to use the tools we need to write fictional narratives. But over the years, I feel I’ve become adept with those tools, and I can make decisions about how I want to write a story much quicker now than I was then. I can imagine what it would look like in various tenses and perspectives and structures, etc., and don’t need to experiment on the page to know how things would change depending on what choices I make.

So now I make all of those decisions before I begin writing, and then I sit down and generally write the story from page one until the end, going back each day to revise on a sentence level what I’ve written the day before. As I write, I make a list of things I feel are problems I didn’t anticipate before I started writing the story, and then once I have a first draft, I go back and try to fix those things. After that, if I can’t see anything I’d still like to do in the story, I send it to a couple of friends, the writers Mary Rickert and Richard Bowes, to read and to hear what they think of it. Once I have their feedback, I may revise the story again before sending it to a publisher.

Summarise your most recent/next book in up to 5 words and a meme.

My most recent book is a young adult novel called The Gone Away Place. Five words: Natural disaster, survival guilt, ghosts.

I don’t even know where to begin when it comes to a meme for this!

Which three authors would you say influenced your writing the most?

Ursula K. Le Guin, Jeanette Winterson, and Shirley Jackson.

If (when!) your book(s) were to be made into movies, who would you like to direct them?

I’ve had one novel, One for Sorrow, turned into a film by the name of Jamie Marks is Dead. The director for that film was Carter Smith. But if another of my books was made into a film, I’d love to see what Jane Campion would do with my novel Wonders of the Invisible World, or Sofia Coppola with my novel in stories set in Japan, The Love We Share Without Knowing.

And for something that is also very important to us & what we put a lot of emphasis on when blogging. What does ownvoices LGBT representation mean to you?

It’s so important for ownvoices LGBT representation to exist because this is our experience, and we understand it intimately. While I don’t have a problem at all with writers who are not LGBT writing LGBT characters and stories (because part of writing fiction is imagining what life is like for people who are not like us, and this creates and exercises our capacity for compassion as well as the imagination) we still do need to have our own voices telling these stories primarily. For both other LGBT readers to know they are not alone, to see themselves rendered in a story that is familiar and reflective of their experiences, but also for people who aren’t LGBT, so that they have our stories to turn to in order to listen and learn what our lives are like from the source itself.

Rec us some great LGBT books you’ve read recently! One can never have enough recommendations!

Right now I’m reading a short story collection by the author Matthew Bright, called Stories to Sing in the Dark. It will be published by Lethe Press this coming September. I’m just lucky enough to be able to read it ahead of time. It’s the author’s first collection, and his stories are wonderful bits of fantasy and horror.

What’s one piece of advice you would like to give your younger self?

 Everything will be all right.

If you could have dinner with one member of the LGBT community, dead or alive, who would it be?

I think I’d like to sit and sup with Oscar Wilde, and hopefully be delighted by his famed wit all evening.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Award winning novel, One for Sorrow, which was made into the Sundance feature film, Jamie Marks is Dead. His second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula and Tiptree Awards. His third novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, is a Stonewall Honor Book. He is also the author of Before and Afterlives, which won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection. His most current novel is, The Gone Away Place. He grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and has taught English outside of Tokyo, Japan. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.

Add on Goodreads | Buy Wonders of the Invisible World | Buy The Gone Away Place