Summer Sessions 2011: Session One
What is The Summer Sessions?
The Summer Sessions is a project I organized in Summer 2010 with the help of Melissa Dominic, bringing authors, poets, photographers and artists together under a common theme: A desire to create. This year's project consists of ten people, in different stages of their careers and creative development, from different cultural and educational backgrounds, who agreed to be interviewed and interview one another, with the goal of cross-posting each others' interviews in our respective blogs. It's a project about knowing who's in our community, and giving back to that community by helping one another promote our own work.
For the next ten days, I will be posting these interviews. Welcome to The Summer Sessions.
SESSION ONE: SHILO COULTER, INTERVIEWED BY JOLENE FRANCES.
As a writer with a deep love of music and an ever-changing style, Shilo Coulter shares with us a little bit about her work, her love of journals, and her favorite words. You can find more about Shilo at her website, Faux Riot.
1. When did you first consider yourself a writer?
8th grade Science class. I started, very suddenly, to write my very first story. It was a hideous teenage love drama, written in first person (and of course, I shamelessly lived vicariously through the main female character) and cleverly called "My Story." After 40 pages and an entire semester, I had had enough, and didn't start writing again until 10th grade Art class. I began writing 5 of 7, a crime thriller, and an Untitled vampire story that was inspired, no surprise, by Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. I eventually scrapped the vampire project, and put 5 of 7 on the sidelines because at fifteen I knew that I didn't have the skills to give it the dedication it deserved (I still don't, as far as I'm concerned, but it sits quietly in a folder on my computer). In 11th grade, my family moved to a new city, and I had a whole new life that, at sixteen, I couldn't adjust to. I felt alone and scared, so I turned to my stories for comfort, and through them, I made new friends (specifically, met my best friend), and I discovered the person I wanted to be, and the life I wanted to live. That was the defining point for me. When I realized how much writing, and telling stories, and creating characters and worlds, meant to me — how much it helped me express everything I was, that. That was when I knew writing was what I wanted to do with my life.
2. Do you listen to music while writing?
That's basically like asking if I breathe while I write! Music is one of my biggest inspirations. It helps set the mood for scenes, it becomes anthems for characters and themes for entire projects. One of my biggest branch-hobbies from my writing is that I make soundtracks (not playlists, no, I consider these full fledged soundtracks) for everything. Characters, relationships, scenes, plots… I'll even choose a song to listen to on repeat just because it may have a lyric that's similar to a line of dialogue I wrote.
In fact, one of my favourite times to write, is Thursday nights when I go downtown to a little café for the Open Mic night. Answering most of these interview questions, I'm actually sitting at a table there right now, listening to a friend as she's up on stage. I'm friends with all the performers, and listening to them sing and play music is so inspiring to me that I find myself pulling out my notebook and writing things down, even if they're just sentences or entire chapters. Music plays a very crucial role in my writing.
3. Have you learned anything from other writers? What's the best writing tip you've ever been given?
I'm always, always, always learning from other writers, both published and unpublished. You should never stop learning things about your writing, or someone else's writing, or writing in general, just like you should never stop learning about other things in life. Can I think of anything I've learned specifically? No, not really — at least, not one thing that would be more important than the countless others.
The best tip I've ever been given, though not verbatim, would be: to write what I want, whatever it is, no matter who is going to like it and who is going to hate it, and to write how I know to write, not how someone else can teach or tell me to. My friends are the best at giving me tips, without even realizing they're doing it. They all have this habit of saying something that just hits me, and lets me know that this, writing, is what I'm meant to do.
4. Where do you draw inspiration from in your writing?
Existing.
5. Do you have a specific style? If so, what would you call it or define it as?
I have a hideous writing style that would give English teachers aneurisms. I am full of run on sentences, fragments, repetition, and an excess of italics and em-dashes. I like to think that my style emphasizes the emotion in the scene. If something is dramatic, action packed, overwhelming, then I like to write it that way, until you're practically losing (or holding) your breath while reading it.
My style also changes from project to project. For example, with The Forgetting Boy, my fantasy novel, I'm much more eloquent and… gentle, with my words, than I am in, say, The De Sade Virus, a co-written project about survivors in a world where a deadly disease has ruined any chance of recovering from the series of natural disasters that destroyed everything — in De Sade, I write much more violently, and urgently.
It can also vary from character to character. Writing Dodge Kelly, an average but sad boy who's basically a living, breathing embodiment of the city he lives in, is much more subdued and passive, but also more intuitive, than writing Gemini, a vulgar hitman struggling with his conscience, whose personality is reflected in the way I describe the actions he takes and his surroundings.
Basically, my style is inconsistent, and I guess that's a style in and of itself.
6. Is it difficult to keep the motivation to finish an entire story? How do you keep yourself motivated?
For me, it's never about the motivation, that's the one thing I never lose. I have a lot of trouble focusing on one project long enough to finish it. I finish chapters and scenes and snippets all the time, all the time, but eventually I wander to another project. In a roundabout way, that's how I do keep my motivation though. If I begin to write something, I get… basically homesick, for other characters and worlds, and I'll think about them until finally I just go back to them. It keeps me pushing forward on several things, but it's a slow pace. I don't really complain, though.
7. Where do you write, most often?
Currently, my couch. I moved into a two-bedroom apartment specifically so that I could create a writing room for myself, but I've since adopted a second bed and couch, and the room has become crowded and gone from a writing room to a spare bedroom. I write downtown at the café I mentioned before, but there's really no where that I go to specifically to write, no. I write when I need to, so, wherever I am, I write.
8. Do you express yourself creatively, in ways other than writing?
I do! I have several other outlets, actually. I paint and collage, both traditionally and digitally. I absolutely love doing graphic design, and make digital journal pages. I dabble in interior decorating, or at least I like to think I do, and, though it feels so cliché these days, I'm also really into photography. I've been trying to justify spending the money on a nice, respectable DSLR camera, but I can wait until I both deserve it and can afford it. I also love to cook extravagant meals, if that counts as expressing myself creatively?
9. Do you keep a written journal?
I am an elite, obnoxious hipster. I carry on my person, at all times, three Moleskine notebooks. One is the classic black cover with lined pages, the other has a red cover with blank pages, and the last is one of the tiny brown cardstock ones. I would never have owned a Moleskine in my life had it not been for the fact that I got my first one as a Christmas present, and then I was hooked. They are personal journals that I write absolutely everything in, from trivial moments in my life, to Chinese food menus, to really important thoughts, to bits and pieces of stories. I also carry another notebook with me, and I have a shoebox in my writing room stuffed with journals I haven't touched yet. I'm always buying more, even if I know I won't be using them for years. I also get journals specifically for projects, and I've even started to keep a journal written from one of my character's point of view. So, yes. I am a journal whore.
10. Do you have a favourite author? If so, why are they your favourite?
I have several. I grew up on Stephen King, which isn't all that rare, I know. Desperation was the first book I read that wasn't mandatory for school. I read it when I was ten. I'm reading his autobiography, On Writing, at the moment. He's a staple author for me, I need his stories in my life, but he's not my favourite.
Christopher Moore is my favourite author. I stumbled upon him by pure fluke (Moore fans will get that joke), and was hooked instantly. My favourite of his is LAMB, and A Dirty Job. His novels are all, or mostly, comedies, and he's great with wit, and dark humour, with some really well-placed slapstick moments, but through all of that, he never fails to tell a really ingenious, touching story. I'm not a big fan of comedy, especially in movies and television, so he's my outlet for that.
I also admire and respect Chuck Palahniuk, though more for his style of writing and less for his actual stories. Haunted had a really, really big impact on my writing style, though.
11. Do you have a favourite word, or a list of favourite words?
This is pretty much my dream interview question. I have both. My two, be-all end-all favourite words, are civil and riot, and I honestly never noticed the juxtaposition between them before until just now. That speaks volumes about the person I am.
I do have a list of favourite words. It's huge and always growing, so I'll just pick some at random to share: awkward, runaway, average, context, raw, weathered, gentleman, freakshow, vertigo, intentions, hipbone, wires, street, loyalty, revolutionary, technophobia, motherfucker, theory, mechanical, wreck, fool, worst, role, guts, method, gypsy, knot, city, bone, this, exist, thrill, anatomy, state, basis, worth, vulgar, legend, still, scrapes, satisfy, boy, dirt, nerve, and settle
