Spencer Ellsworth generously volunteered his time as my SFWA mentor and taught me a thing or two about the publishing business. Like me, he’s a fan of Octavia Butler. Unlike me, he’s writing from 4:45am to 6:45am, hours in which I prefer to be soundly asleep.
Word Craft is a deep dive into writers’ methods and practices. Please welcome Spencer Ellsworth, author of The Great Faerie Strike (just released on Aug. 5th) as well as The Starfire Trilogy.
-J.D.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tell us a little about yourself and what inspired you to become a writer.
A little bit… Well, I sometimes dream of climbing on a war mammoth and forging a path northward, where the sky lights up from the battles of the gods. That good?
Seriously, I’m one of those who always wrote. I made picture books before I could string sentences together. I have a vague memory of working on an Ewok story at age 5, sitting in church with my family penning an epic sequel to that unappreciated cinematic gem The Battle For Endor.
What’s your book (The Great Faerie Strike) about?
Love, murder, mystery, gnomes, werewolves, vampires and labor unions! The Otherworld has industrialized in 1850, churning out seven-league boots and invisibility cloaks from assembly lines. The wealthy werewolf family, the Ridleys lays off half their factory workforce to replace them with easily pliable vampires. Our hero, the gnome Charles, won’t take that lying down, especially not after he is inspired by a strange little human named Karl Marx. Our heroine, Jane the vampire reporter, joins in to investigate the murders, mysterious manufacturing practices, and dark secrets of the werewolf bourgeoisie. Together, they’ll being down the fat cats or die trying.
What author has most influenced you, and why?
Probably Octavia Butler, because I can read her work again and again and get something new from it every time. I love the way she deals with the themes of violence, community-building, change, and slavery over and over again in different ways.
Also, I read basically every cheap crappy comic book produced between 1992 and 1994, which means I read a lot of terrible stuff at a formative age. So I enjoy cheap tricks. Give me all your sudden resurrections, unexpected love affairs, bad puns, and gratuitous violence.
INSPIRATION AND MOTIVATION
Why do you write?
That is a good question. I always have, since I learned how, and the more I do it, the thicker and faster the story ideas come. Do you know how to stop? Like, a 12-step program?
Have you ever taken an extended break from writing? If so, why, and what brought you back?
I actually got myself sent to a wilderness camp for misbehaving kids when I was a teenager, and in the backcountry of Arizona, killing rattlesnakes and eating papago lilies, I… still wrote.
I’ve tried! I’m not good at taking breaks, and I have to shut off my inner workaholism to do it.
Extended breaks are good, though, no matter what the Gospel of Work says. Especially if your life is too stressful. I enjoy writing, but I’m no longer the guy who puts You Should Be Writing on every available surface. Workaholism kills. I do it because I love it, and I stop when it’s not fun.
What do you do when you need additional inspiration or ideas?
Nature, maaaaaan. I live in one of those beautiful seaside West Coast college towns with miles of greenways and lots of water for kayaking, great trails and great views. Again, I have to fight my workaholism because otherwise I let too much time go by without enjoying such a beautiful place.
Do you finish everything you start? If a piece isn’t working, at what point do you cut your losses and abandon it?
Literally, no; I have dozens of false starts lying around. But in the long run, everything is grist for the mill, including false starts. So in a roundabout way, I finish everything I start by reusing all my false starts in later ideas! I’m currently working on a YA novel that is, no joke, a retelling of a story I tried to write when I was eight years old.
METHODS AND PRACTICES
How often do you write?
Every day… ish. I work at a college, and I get up before work and write during the morning September-June, from about 4:45 AM till I have to get the kids ready at 6:45. Yes, I am one of those morning people everyone hates. In summer, the college goes to four 10-hour days, and I work 6:30-4:30 M-Th, so I have to get there early and do a little bit of writing at lunch instead, but I get a long session every Friday summer morning.
The Ellsworth desk.
Do you have a regular time of day and place that your write?
There’s a small room in my house’s converted garage that doubles as my office/our laundry room. This is one of those benefits that comes with having a day job—you curse the lack of time for your art, but you get to have things like a house with a (small!) space to write in.
Do you keep a writing log? What data do you track (word count, session start/end, etc.)?
I only really track word count during NaNoWriMo, when I am determined to beat Cory Skerry. He knows what he did.
Writing very fast is good for the writer. NaNoWriMo helps a lot of people have fun, meet people, discover their creative juices, and work through a lot of trauma, shyness and pain that keeps them from writing otherwise. But for most writers, there’s a point where you have to slow down for the tricky bits. I think that word count is generally a poor measure of overall writing success. I can write bad draft very quickly, but I’m a better writer when I go at about 3/5th of NaNo speed.
What elements of your life distract you from writing the most, and how do you manage those distractions?
The usual. Tiredness, depression, complicated life events, the Internet. The state of the world, man. It warms and chokes, warms and chokes. The fascists return, and find their old lie still works. The old existential dread isn’t easy to put aside, even when you’re channeling it into your work.
Also, it’s hard to compartmentalize time. Some projects are fine with an hour and a half a day, but some projects do better with very long blocks of time.
Do you revise as you go, or wait for a complete first draft?
I try to only do minimal revisions as I go. It’s better to treat a draft as a Whole Thing, let the story happen fairly naturally. When I write a very long piece, though, I tend to have to stop and do some revisions out of necessity when there’s too many continuity issues. You throw a few too many balls in the air, you have to get those balls under control, man.
Who sees your work first, and why?
My wife reads just about everything (applause!) although usually my friend Langley Hyde, who reads at Ludicrous Speed, gets through it first. She’s a fantastic first reader and editor who always has good comments and catches the continuity issues.
What’s your backup system (for computer files)?
*looks around* I feel like I should have more than this… it’s just Google Drive and in hardware, a USB stick. Back in the day when it was ONLY a USB stick, I had a laptop stolen, and learned something about backing my stuff up more than once every couple of weeks.
Do you have any particular methods via which you communicate with your subconscious mind?
That’s an interesting question, unless I go for an obvious joke about Grateful Dead concerts. That’s where the good stuff came in, man!
I think exercise is my best method for this. Getting out and moving tends to put me in a kind of Zen mode; walking or running, especially.
What methods or practices have you used to increase your productivity?
Exercise! Again! SQUATS, BRO!!! I am a much better writer if I get some exercise every day, and most of my good ideas come while I’m running. (Imagine how much better I’d be if I were always running after a war mammoth.)
I also tend to use the Pomodoro method when I’m having trouble focusing. A half hour of focused time is much better than two hours of poking at something but never really sinking in.
How important are lighting, sound/silence, smells, and other sensory factors to your writing process?
I like some music in the background, but of course I have to be able to tune it out in order to write, so it has to be good music, music I love, stuff that I adore so well that… it’s basically white noise. Sort of cheapens it when you think about things that way, eh?
FORTHCOMING
What are you working on now, and what projects do you have scheduled?
I’m currently working on a big huge fantasy, based on religious revivals in early Jacksonian America, if early Jacksonian America was full of portals to other worlds. THE GREAT FAERIE STRIKE comes out on August 5th, 2019, and will be the best time with a faerie union you’ve ever had. I’ve also got a story coming out later this year in the anthology A PUNK ROCK FUTURE.
Follow Spencer Ellsworth: Twitter | Goodreads
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Linda Lancione
Funny guy!