Mike Resnick on his Science Fiction Writing Career - Part 2 of 3

Mike Resnick PART II

WAPYB: The first sentences for all your short stories are tidy grabbers that really put the reader "in" the story -- is this a conscious part of your style?

MR: Of course. If you write a short story, it’s most likely going to appear in a magazine or an anthology along with a bunch of other stories. Starting with a grabber is your way of saying, “Hey, read me first! If you think this opening is interesting, keep reading; I’ve got even better things up the road!”

WAPYB: Also, do you plot out short stories or is it more of a "got an idea gonna plow ahead" type of situation?

MR: I absolutely plot them out. I never sit down to write until I know exactly what’s going to occur, start to finish, in a story. I know every name, every incident, sometimes entire lines and paragraphs. My characters don’t run off and surprise me with their antics; I’d go crazy writing that way. I pull the strings; they do the song and dance.

WAPYB: Is novel writing a whole different process from short stories? How do you prepare for novel writing?

MR: The same way: thoroughly. It usually takes more research (almost never scientific, in my case), and of course you’ll have more characters and more subplots, and you may have to work out your world/future/setting more completely, but it’s the same process. Most stories by pros (which is to say, writers who have sold and who clearly know how to write) that go bad do so because the writer hasn’t done sufficient preparation.

WAPYB: I read that you typically write from 10:00PM to around 5:00AM-is this in bursts of a few weeks--or a fairly steady schedule, and has this always been the hours you've kept as a writer? Is this when your sci-fi brain turns on?

MR: I found out a third of a century ago that no one phones you or drops by to visit between 10 PM and 5 AM, so that’s when I can work without interruption. That’s been my schedule for almost as long as I’ve been a writer.

Oh, and one more thing: I’m one of the 90% of science fiction writers who considers the term “Sci-Fi” a pejorative. If you use it in an interview, a number of them will end the interview right there. To many of us it brings up images of horrible 1950s pulps and stupid science fiction movies, doubtless because the term was created by Forry Ackerman, who did more to popularize that kind of “sci-fi” than anyone else.

WAPYB: Does your agent deal with selling all your books abroad? Do you end up making more money all toll on foreign rites?

MR: She sells my books abroad. I sell most of my short stories abroad. When I’m a Guest of Honor in some other country – I’ve been flown to France five times, Slovakia once, Canada twice, for conventions (and of course I’ve attended overseas Worldcons) – I certainly do what I can to make contacts and befriend editors and (especially) translators, but if they’re book editors and translators eventually the offers come in to my agent, as they should.

WAPYB: How did you get involved with e-publishing? Do you find you are gaining new fans from this technology? It seems like it would be a terrific source of marketing your books.

MR: Fictionwise.com started in business about 5 years ago with just a small handful of science fiction writers, who sold them not new material, but reprints. There was me, and Bob Silverberg, and Nancy Kress, and James Patrick Kelly, and no more than three or four others. We never dreamed we’d see any Royalties after the generous prices they paid – but just about all our stories had earned out in just a few months, and they began buying others, and expanding. Today they’ve got about 4,000 authors, including Dan Brown, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and that whole crowd. I was their Author of the Year in 2001 and 2004, a combination of sales and reader ratings, and it’s certainly helped my foreign sales, since a lot of people overseas who couldn’t get their hands on a certain novel or story can pick it up for a pittance or two at Fictionwise.com, and this has resulted in a lot of sales – just in the past month, 4 to Italy, 1 to Poland, and 2 to the Czech Republic.

I also was a regular columnist, along with just about every other major writer in the field, for the late, lamented, high-paying Galaxyonline.com, which was edited by Ben Bova. I did a column every 2 weeks for it, and wept bitter tears when it finally died, and I’m sure it got me some more readers.

I never tried to sell Ellen Datlow at scifi.com (a fact I now regret) because I thought it didn’t really count if it wasn’t in a print magazine or anthology, but lately I’ve decided it’s ridiculous to ignore the better Internet markets, especially when some of them are paying 3 times what the magazines are paying, so I just sold a novelette to Baen’s Universe, and have committed to write them another novelette later this summer.

WAPYB: Do you slip a little non-fiction from your own life from time to time? I know this is cliché‚ but I couldn't help but wonder if (Hugo award winning) Travels With My Cats had some of your own personal epiphany in it.

MR: Every writer puts a bit of himself into every book and story. I put a lot more of my experiences into my African fiction than I did with Travels With My Cats. (More than one reader has written to me to say they’ve gone hunting for Travels With My Cats in their local second-hand bookstores. I suppose I ought to attach a label stating that the story is fiction.)

WAPYB: Do you feel you will always keep the humor in your books and that science fiction is the genre that you will stick with?

MR: I think if I could only write one thing, it’d be humor. (So says the guy with 5 Hugos and 28 Hugo nominations, none of them for anything funny.) I love writing it, and I’ve been able to get it published – not always an easy trick. I’ve sold 6 humorous novels in the field, I had a 37-story collection of humorous science fiction out a couple of years ago titled In Space No One Can Hear You Laugh, and I’ve probably written another 15 funny stories since then.

WAPYB: Let's say I'm reading this interview and I want to break into the sci-fi genre, that I fancy myself the next You -- what do I need to know about myself to reach my lofty goal? For instance, I know you are very passionate about writing-that is it something you must do, what other traits do you possess that have driven you to where you are now?

MR: First, at the risk of being redundant, you disabuse yourself of the notion that the field is called sci-fi. Second, you read extensively in the field; science fiction requires that more than any other fiction field. Third, you sit down and you write: day in, day out, night in, night out. You don’t think about it, you don’t talk about it, you do it.

The primary thing that keeps me working at this rate when I should be slowing down at age 64 is the knowledge that I’m a hell of a lot closer to the end than the beginning, and I’ve still got hundreds of stories to tell. Got to get as many of them out as I can. Besides, that’s how I define myself – I’m not a farmer, I’m not a basketball player, I’m not a banker; I’m a writer…and writers write.

About Mike Resnick

Resnick Mike Resnick has won an impressive five Hugos and been nominated for twenty-two more. He has sold forty-eight novels and almost two hundred short stories. He has edited forty anthologies. His work ranges from satirical fair, such as his Lucifer Jones adventures, to weighty examinations of morality and culture, as evidenced by his brilliant tales of Kirinyaga. The series, with 64 major and minor awards and nominations to date, is the most honored series of stories in the history of science fiction.