With just a handful of sales under his belt, author David Marusek is shaping up to be something of a heavy hitter. Since 1993, his work has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Playboy, and THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION. His novella "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy" was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, placed third on the Asimov's Readers Poll, and is now on the preliminary Nebula ballot.

David recently took time out from this rollercoaster ride to share his thoughts on the craft and business of writing.

KR: Why did you start writing? What was it about the craft of storytelling that sucked you in?

DM: What I'm most interested in is giving the reader the same sort of insights and visceral experience that I enjoy. Imagine you're riding a bus or standing in queue at a check out, and you have one of those brilliant non-sequitor flashes that people often have. Maybe something as inconsequential as the relationship between white pine and nordic sports or the observation of how popular the color teal has become lately and what does it have to do with ducks? I believe most people would observe the thought as it passed through their awareness, say "Cool," and go on with practical matters. The writer may take a note. I take mental notes. I have a whole warehouse of these mental notes. When I write, it's a process of notes migrating to the top of the pile where I can pick them up and say, yes, this is exactly what I need here. Maybe that's why it takes me so long to write. I'm brooding on top of my mountain of mental notes. One of the greatest pleasures I obtain from publishing my work is seeing the product of my absent-minded noodling in print.

KR: Who was one of the first writers to inspire you?

DM: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, when I was in college. He was the ultimate stylist. All my early stuff was probably overwritten, florid. It took the austerity of Raymond Carver to knock that out of my system.

I believe my voice was set decades ago when I was a kid and reading SF, dog stories, legends about the Crusades, Hardy Boys, etc. I was a voracious reader and got top grades in English. By the fifth grade I'm sure I knew every part of speech, including the elusive adverbial noun, and could diagram any sentence you threw at me. My daughter today, a victim of the "whole language" method of teaching, has not only never learned to spell, but doesn't know a gerund from an appositive. Of course a writer uses his or her ear, and not a grammar book, to write, but I don't think I suffered by learning the rules of standard American English. It allows me to polish my work to a distinctive degree.

KR: Let's talk about the anatomy of your first sale, "The Earth Is On the Mend." How did you feel when you realized it was going to appear in Asimov's?

DM: You gotta understand, I was writing every day for six and a half years already--mostly the same endless novel--and hadn't sold anything. At that time I wanted to be published more than anything in the world, but nothing was happening. I felt that the novel was my natural form, but I had to admit I didn't know how to write one. That's when I heard about Clarion. It was billed as the boot camp for SF writers and specifically for the short story form. So I figured I could learn to write something short, sell it, and get my name on the boards, so to speak. Well, Clarion exceeded my highest expectations. If you're ready for it, if you have all the elements of writing down pat but only need a little help in putting them together, then Clarion is the place to go. Six weeks of intensive reading, writing and critiquing. Each week a different instructor, the best writers working today. Under their guidance, I saw stories on the blackboard and in my head in a new way. We had to write and submit for criticism a story a week for six weeks. And as it turned out, one of the stories I wrote there was the short short, "The Earth Is on the Mend." Two weeks later Gardner Dozois, editor of Asimov's, was our instructor. Before he even arrived he'd read all 80 of the stories my class had written thus far. When I had my one-on-one meeting with him, he talked about all the stories I'd turned in, their strengths and weaknesses, and then casually said he'd take "The Earth Is on the Mend." I tried to be as casual as he, but I was already floating several inches off my chair.

That sale changed my life. At last I began to call myself a writer. Before, when anyone asked, I would only say that I was writing stuff, but now I was a writer. It ushered in a three month stretch of unbound ecstacy. That winter I had to buy a new hat, since my old one no longer fit my swollen head.

Of course, such a high high brings an eventual crash. It was at this time that I began my novella, "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy," and these rollercoaster feelings fed right into the story.

KR: What was the editing process like?

DM: There was virtually no editing done on Gardner's part on this story. I did a lot of research for something so short. I remember that I had to choose to go with the correct term, "snowshoe rabbit," for instance, or what people around here usually called it, "snowshoe hare." Stuff like that.

I am such a slow and careful writer, that so far I haven't been edited very much. Gardner did help me with "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy," however. It was a 36,000 word story. On my own, I cut it down to 28,000 words, which is the length he bought. Then on the telephone he told me paragraph by paragraph where I could do further cutting, which brought it down to its final length of 23,000 words. This 30% cut from its original size made it a much stronger story, and I appreciate that kind of expert editing. Note that he allowed me to do the cutting.

KR: "The Earth Is On the Mend" was only 1,100 words. Do you feel the length worked to your advantage in terms of cracking the market?

DM: Yes and no. Gardner, I think, had mentioned at Clarion that the short short is an easy length to buy because there are often small holes in a publication which an inventory of short shorts can help fill. So it may be a good way to break into print. On the other hand, for all its brevity, it is one of the hardest forms to get right. Imagine trying to pack a whole story, characterization, theme, plot, everything into a thousand words. You can spend as much time on a short short as on a short story, but since magazines pay by the word, you can end up with no more that peanuts for all your effort. This didn't stop me from framing a copy of my first professional check--$65 from Asimov's--and hanging it on my wall. And just as important, a short short gets no respect. It's like tossing a pebble into the ocean. Doesn't make a dent. While that story changed my life, I'm sure it didn't change anyone else's.

KR: "She Was Good—She Was Funny" appeared in Playboy. How did that sale come about?

DM: An editor I met sent the story to Playboy, not me. I hadn't gotten around to marketing it yet. So the call from Alice Turner (which I've saved on my answering machine tape) was a bolt from the blue. By the way, this is another story I wrote while at Clarion, and it's not SF, but crime set in Alaska. It's a fun little tale with a twist at the end in the best Playboy tradition.

KR: What, to your way of thinking, are the ups and downs of publishing in a market like Playboy?

DM: There are a lot of ups. Sorry, I can't think of any downs. They pay A LOT. They have a circulation of 3.5 million. They've published most of the major American writers of the last half of the 20th century. I feel privileged to appear there.

KR: How does it feel to have had your work published in three languages?

DM: This in particular is a rush. To go from no sales to being translated within a year. Yow!

KR: Were foreign rights purchased or just optioned in the original contract?

DM: As I recall, they were purchased outright. I'd have to check my contract to be sure, but Playboy is nothing if not a class outfit. Every time the story is reprinted abroad, they send a "bonus" check.

KR: You referred to yourself as a "slow and careful writer." Can you tell us more about your general work ethic and habits?

DM: My work ethic. Writing is of primary importance in my life. Only my family is more important. Thus I don't have a full time job; it would get in the way of my fiction. If I have to decide between sitting down and writing and doing almost anything else, the writing wins. This is convenient because it means the house is messy for a good cause.

My work habits. I write every morning, five or six days a week. I must have a room completely to myself, if not the whole cabin. I write longhand. My first draft tends to be more like an outline. "Then he goes into the kitchen and says something to his son. Then they go out the back door to find the cat. etc." The idea is to first get the whole picture down and then bring it into focus scene by scene, make a stab at descriptions and dialogue, etc. By the third or fourth draft I'll commit it to a word processor. In the past I used to polish it sentence by sentence and word by word at this stage. But that's too time consuming to put into something that might have to be deleted. So now I pass the third or fourth draft around to friends and my writer's group here in Fairbanks (called the Camp Robbers). With the help of about ten readers I learn what is working and what's not. Sometimes I learn things about my story I never knew. I plough all of this back into the story, so the next few drafts may go back to longhand, because a word processor is no good for real, deep revision. I'm working on a story at the moment in which I became convinced that nothing but the title could stay, so I scrapped it all and started from scratch. That's what I mean when I say I'm a slow and careful writer. That 10,000 word story will take me four or more months of daily work to finish, but when it's finished, I'm confident it'll stack up with the best of them.

At noon I go out into the world to earn stuff to throw into the soup pot. In the evenings I do research or marketing. A pro writer once told me that 25% of a writer's time is spent marketing, and I believe it.

Around 9:00 PM I sundown.

KR: Your last story, "We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy" (Asimov's, 11/95), has receieved a lot of attention. How did that one come about? And exactly how fast is your head spinning?

DM: Boy, that story sure has done well for itself. If a short short gets you no notice, a successful novella gets a lot of attention. And we're very fortunate in SF that there are a handful of major markets that publish them on a regular basis.
Naturally the award nominations are thrilling, but in a way they're a relief too. When the second story I ever sold was to Playboy, I wondered if it was an accident, never to be repeated. Maybe I was a flash in the pan. Self-doubt seems to be the creative person's unwelcome companion. When my novella, "Joy," was given a glowing review in Locus, my self-doubt was laid to rest (for a while at least).
The story grew from an image and an idea. The image was of a man being brought low on a public street and his wife abandoning him. The idea was that with nanotechnology a baby of one race could be "adopted" by parents of another and converted to their genetic code, a chilling prospect. Both of these notions went into my writer's notebook in 1992. After Clarion, while savoring my first sale (literally out of my mind), I went through my notebook and realized if I put this image with that idea, I could do a story. I thought it would be a rather short story, but it kept growing. I spent several months banging out a draft to give to my writers group. I remember being high with nervous anticipation when my turn came around. And though the group wasn't overly negative, they did point out enough defects to completely deflate my bubble. I left the meeting declaring that the story was dead and irretrievable. And in fact I shelved it and gave it no more thought until a full year later when, during a routine inventory of my numerous notebooks and binders, I read what I had, saw immediately what needed to be fixed and how to fix it. So I spent almost another half year working on it exclusively. I did so knowing that I didn't have enough of a name to expect an editor to buy it. If short shorts are an editor's hole filler, a novella represents a major investment in space. I knew I was possibly wasting almost a year on something that might never see the light of day.
As I wrote the ending, I had a flash for a completely different one than the one I had intended. So I wrote it instead. Then I sent the new manuscript, now 36,000 words, back through my writers group and gave it to some Clarion friends as well. People liked the story but unanimously hated the ending, not what happened (it was a happy ending) but that it seemed to come out of nowhere, did not flow from the story. So I deleted it and revived the original ending. I sent it out and waited months before hearing anything. The whole process from initial draft to publication took about three years. I'm nothing if not slow.

KR: You've hit in some of the biggest markets around. What are your feelings about small markets? Might you have sold "Joy" to a smaller market if you had exhausted your pro prospects?

DM: I have mixed feelings about the small markets, the zines, print or electronic. On the one hand they greatly broaden the market, making it easier to break into print. This is important, especially for new and/or young writers who need the morale boost of publication to keep slogging away at it. It's tough to write for six-and-a-half years without seeing your work in print. I know. On the other hand, the zines represent a potential trap. Publishing in them does not guarantee eventual publication in the pro markets. I think one should use them like training wheels on a bike. If you have a dozen zine sales but no pro sales, I'd say maybe it's time to take the training wheels off.

As far as how to submit to markets, I believe you should make a list of the potential markets for a particular story from the most prestigious down to the least. Send to the top first and work your way down. Having said that, I must confess that I don't do it. When the top market rejects my work, I lose all confidence in that work and either try to "fix" it or put it aside, sometimes for a year or so, until I can rewrite it.

KR: Any general advice for aspiring writers?

DM: This is good, since I consider myself as aspiring as anyone. About the most useful thing a new writer can do is read critically. Get a half dozen "best of" anthologies and read the stories as a writer, not as a reader. In other words, do some reverse engineering on them, graph the tempo of scenes, recap the story and mark the plot hinges, write thumbnail bios of the characters. When I started writing ten years ago, I got a year's worth of one of my favorite magazines and did a content analysis of the fiction, verb to adjective ratios, word counts, voice and POV, that sort of thing. I'm still doing this, pulling apart literary and commercial stories to see what makes them tick. That's step one. Step two is to forget all that stuff when you sit down to write. Write only the sort of stuff you would like to read.

One last thing. In my opinion, all the years of rejection, hard work, fearing the mailbox, self-doubt, and misunderstanding by friends and family--all of the crap you go through to be a writer--melts away the first time you see your name in print.

KR: What's the future look like? What sorts of projects are you working on right now?

DM: Well, I'm finishing up an early draft of that story I mentioned earlier, the one in which I tossed out everything but the title. The title is "Down at the Grizzly Bar." It's a crime story set in Alaska. I'm submitting it for discussion to my monthly writer's group next week. See how it does.

I'm about two thirds along on an early draft of another SF novella set in a universe somewhat like the one in "Joy." But I need to interrupt that because I think I may have finally, after two years of trying, come up with an idea for a novel. I'm going to do a series of synopses for it, and if it's still viable, I'll write the first 75 pages or so of manuscript. Then I'm going to go shopping for an agent. Wish me luck.

KR: Absolutely. Best of luck in all things, David. And thanks for your time.

Attention Active SFWA Members:

As mentioned, David's novella "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy" is on the Preliminary Ballot for the 1996 Nebula Awards. If you plan to vote this year and would like to read "Joy," it can be found in Asimov's November 1995 or THE YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION, 13th Annual Collection. If you don't already have it on hand, you may e-mail David at ffdm@aurora.alaska.edu for a free copy. Please identify yourself as an Active SFWA member and be sure to include your snail mail address.

About Kurt Roth

Kurt is a graduate of Clarion West 1996. His short story "Drawing Blood" will appear in Britain's Valkyrie early in 1997. Watch for his articles in forthcoming issues of The Market List, Speculations, Tangent, and The Heliocentric Network.

Copyright © 1997 by Kurtis N. Roth. All Rights Reserved.