chiang on writing

[jazzfish]

Interview with Ted Chiang, author of the moderately unsettling What's Expected of Us (warning: PDF) and a distinguished handful of other works of short fiction, in which he reveals that like me (and, I imagine, lots of other people) he was inspired by Asimov's Foundation books.

Writing for publication was always my goal, but making a living writing science fiction wasn't.

On the one hand, yay for being realistic about it. On the other, argh, because Chiang is bloody well brilliant and if anyone can make a living writing SF it ought to be him.

I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers, because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction. Nowadays I work as a freelance writer, so I usually do contract technical writing part of the year and then I take time off and do fiction writing the rest of the year. It's too difficult for me to do technical writing at the same time as fiction writing - they draw on the same parts of my brain. So I can't say it's a good day job in that sense, but it's a way to make money.

This is achingly familiar to me. I spend all day putting words in a specific kind of order. Coming home and doing 'the same thing only different' is draining and not terribly relaxing. I got through the story a couple of weeks ago mostly by not being very useful at work during that week.

I've been thinking for awhile now that working eight or nine months out of the year and taking the other three or four off (to write, or perhaps travel, go backpacking, whatever) would be ideal for me. It's something to look into in a couple of years.

Typically the first part of the story that I write is the very ending, either the last paragraph of the story or a paragraph near the end. Once I have the destination in mind then I can build the rest of the story around that or build the rest of the story in such a way as to lead up to that.

I get my ideas by writing the beginning, or at least what I think is the beginning, and then constantly asking "what happens next?" At some point in that process I start to see the shape of the story and to have an idea of where I want it to end up. With Junkyard Dog I kept writing forwards, and that seems to have been a mistake: I got bogged down with no clear direction. For the space story (which needs a better title than "One Only") I wrote the last scene and that suddenly told me how the rest of the story was going to fit in. I need to remember that, to write the ending once I can see it so that the rest of the story can have a shape to it.

Comments

[awakedreamer.livejournal.com]

Fascinating read. I didn't know that you too were a fan of the great Ted Chiang. Thanks for sharing! :D

[jazzfish]

Quite welcome, glad you enjoyed it!

I ran into one of his stories in an anthology ("Hell is the Absence of God"), and then stumbled across "What's Expected of Us," and was sufficiently intrigued by them both to go hunt up his collection... and that pretty much blew me away from page one.

(He's written a lengthy novella being published in a few months, too.)