We kick the week off with an interview I conducted with Matthew Cheney a writer based in New Hampshire. Matthey writes fiction in a variety of genres and also maintains a very active blog about all things concerning the written word called Mumpsimus (link).

Matthew Cheney is a writer and teacher who lives in New Hampshire. His work has been published by English Journal, Strange Horizons, Failbetter.com, Ideomancer, Pindeldyboz, Rain Taxi, Locus, The Internet Review of Science Fiction and SF Site, among other places.

MT Have you had to make sacrifices in your personal life in order to keep up your writing?

MC Writing of any sort takes up a lot of time, and since I write a weblog, various reviews, the Strange Horizons column, occasional articles,
occasional fiction, etc., I do devote a lot of time to it, which means
that I have less time than I would were I not a writer, and so,
inevitably, yes, there are sacrifices. I’ve somehow managed not to
become completely anti-social. At least most of the time.

MT You’ve discussed story endings at length in Strange Horizons column (Just Tell Me How It Ends - (link). Have you noticed a growing trend towards Deus Ex Machina type endings in Science Fiction published in the past ten years? And if so is it necessarily a bad
thing?

MC There’s not a growing trend toward deus ex machina, because the quality of writing overall within the SF field seems to me to be higher now than it ever was. It’s easy to get a rosy, nostalgic view of the past, because time has buried mounds of awful writing.

What I think there is within any genre of popular fiction is a continuing tendency to tie things up neatly, because this is comforting to us as readers. It’s unsettling to think about how unresolved everything in life is. But stories are often unsatisfying unless they bring something to conclusion, and the easiest way to do that is to do it neatly. Often such neat endings also force sentimental, wishful situations on the stories, and so we are told that love wins out in the end, sacrifice is worthwhile, heroes are vindicated, etc. All of which is utter horse effluent. The only realistic ending is that everybody dies eventually. But that’s not exactly what we want to read in every
book and story or see in every film. A lot of the time, we read to escape our knowledge that death is the only conclusion. I don’t think that’s a bad thing; you’re hardly a better person if you go around saying, “Well, we’ll all be dead eventually,” than you are if you try to make a meaningful life for yourself. But for me as a reader, endings that don’t at least hint at the complexity of life and the ineffable elements of experience are unsatisfactory, a cop-out, a lie.

As for deus ex machinas, they can work, sure — in comedy.

MT Some writers claim to have dialogues with their characters. Do you hear voices too?

MC Oh yes. I spent three years specifically training as a playwright, so voices are what I hear more than anything. I can’t write anything — a story, an essay, a grocery list — unless I have a sense of the voice behind it.

That said, I don’t much believe in the “characters have a life of their own” theory of writing. That’s an illusion writers cling to to express a state of low-level hypnosis, or subconscious intuition, but the characters are just words, and the words can be changed.

MT Do you have a strict writing routine? Are there any bizarre rituals or practices involved in your writing?

MC My routine is one of hyperactive procrastination. I always work on one thing so I don’t have to work on another. If somebody gets an email from me, it’s probably because I have a deadline looming for something else. (For instance, right now I’ve got a bunch of things due by the middle of next week, few of which I’ve even begun.) I don’t have any rituals, but there are conditions under which I find it difficult to write — I’m extremely sensitive to sounds, for instance, particularly voices. (Because I need to hear my own.) I like to write in silence, but we don’t live in a silent world, and so often I will write with music in the background to drown out the other sounds. I can listen to music I know well without really hearing it, which is usually as close to silence as I can achieve, unless I write late at night, which I like to do whenever possible.

MT What’s the most annoying thing about being a writer?

MC For me, it’s not having one type of writing that I can really feel accomplished at, that I can feel is my own. I’ve been writing since I was in grade school, but I have always flitted around from one type of writing to another — stories, poems, essays, reviews, plays, screenplays, blogging. To become a good writer, unless you’re just phenomenally talented, requires hundreds and thousands of hours of bad writing. If you put your hundreds and thousands of hours of bad writing into one form of writing, you’re likely to get to a good level of competency within, oh, a couple decades. I spent most of my childhood focusing on fiction and poetry. Then I switched to plays and screenplays. Then I gave up on writing altogether for a year or two. Then I returned and tried to write very literary fiction and poetry. By that time I realized some limits, and gave up a few things — I’m a dreadful poet, for instance. And I’ll probably never write a very good
science fiction story, because to write core science fiction well you have to be as interested in the concept of the story — the gadgets, the setting — as you are in characters and language, and I’m just not all that interested, as a writer, in concepts (though I am often in awe of cool concepts as a reader, partly because it’s not my forte as a writer).

It’s strange, actually, to be known primarily as a reviewer, critic, and blogger, because these are the forms of writing I have given the least amount of apprentice time to, and they are the ones that in my heart I value least. Which may be a contradiction to what I said about needing decades of bad writing behind you. In many ways, though, writing is
writing, and the apprentice work can help a person develop a fluency in a wide variety of forms. Fluency, however, is different from quality, which is a fact I wish more SF writers would recognize.

MT Have you ever had to make compromises in writing a story to satisfy space constraints/word count?

MC Not with fiction (yet). I wouldn’t be likely to make such compromises if it were a story I cared about. Nonfiction, though, I’ve often had to cut and rearrange to fit a particular space or word count. One of the nice things about publishing online is not having to deal with such problems. Among my reviews at SF Site, for instance, are very short and very long pieces — sometimes too long — all of which are exactly the length I wrote them at, for better or worse.

MT What are you working on now?

MC Too much. I’m writing a story for an anthology John Klima is editing for Bantam of stories based on words from spelling bees. I’ve got a bunch of reviews to finish reading for. I’m revising a review that the editor sent back saying I had compromised my argument by avoiding specific negative comments about some stories in an anthology (he’s right, alas). I’m finishing up classes for a masters degree at Dartmouth College and have two major pieces of writing due by the middle of next week. Then I have to start work on my thesis, which is about Samuel R. Delany. I’m working on an interview with Kit Reed for SF Site that I’ve been neglectful of. Lining up a series of interviews with book editors for The Mumpsimus for this summer. I’ve got an idea for a play that I really want to write. Oh, and there’s an outline for a novel that I’ve been playing with in all my copious spare time.

MT Who for your money is (or was) the most underrated science fiction writer?

MC It depends who’s doing the rating. Among people who know SF well, I think there’s not enough appreciation of a lot of writers, from Judith Merril to David Bunch to Michael Bishop. An argument could be made that almost all writers are not appreciated enough, because the
over-appreciated writers ([cough] Dan Brown John Grisham [cough]) are really a very small minority. One of my own goals is to try to help SF readers appreciate more weird and fantastical writers who do not get labelled as SF writers, and to try to help non-SF readers appreciate some of the really fine work being done by people who are labelled as SF writers, because ultimately I just want there to be more happy, content readers and writers in the world.

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