The Author Interviews, Round 1: #13: Ien Nivens
Writer number 13 in my Author Interviews series is the talentedIen Nivens, author ofTangible Angels.
You are living in the world from your latest novel. Where are you? What is it like?You won’t find Keening on most maps of Oklahoma, but if you take Route 60 at Fairview and head west toward Seiling, then north on N2370 and take a left at some point, you’re apt to come across an old boy making lazy circles on a riding lawnmower in the front yard of his daddy’s farmhouse. It’s the one with black shutters and a barn that lists in the direction of the ceaseless wind. He might be able to point you the right way. He likes walnuts if you have any.You are your most recent protagonist. Who are you? What is the first thing you do?My name’s Vanessa. I own and operate a shop out south of town called Tangible Angels. First thing I do of a morning? Especially now that Jeannie’s gone, you’re liable to find me wandering down to the canyon like my grandma did in her old age, though I’m only pushing forty and I ain’t half as suicidal as she was. Just mystified. Folks say all sorts of things about me, a few of which hold some semblance to fact. Believe what you choose, but no, I do not pine for Jeannie Ivory’s return. I worry myself half to death she might is more like it.Who is your favourite author? Why?That covers a lot of territory. Lately, I wish I could write stories as charming and as odd as Raoul Dahl’s, but write them for adults and give them titles that do not alliterate. Ursula LeGuin and John Gardner (the one who wrote Grendel and October Light) win my all-time admiration. Gardner taught me how to carve a sentence as sturdy as a walking stick and to trust my sense of rhythm. LeGuin’s the one who, for me, made writing fantasy seem a useful thing to do.Where do you get your ideas?I am of two minds, one of which does not go looking for story ideas because it doesn’t put much stock in them. I’m more interested in people and in their ideas—that is, in the beliefs, values and desires that drive them into conflict with one another and cause them to do crazy, sometimes noble, things. That’s where stories come from in my view, from the collision of ideas already at play in the world, not from new ideas I need to come up with or root around for. I watch politics. I spy on the neighbors. I practice armchair psychology.On the other hand, I can trace Tangible Angels back to a specific conglomeration of ideas and try to describe how they came together to make a story. So let me do that.As an assignment for a correspondence course in writing for children, I explored a memory from my childhood in Oklahoma, an excursion down North Boggy Creek to find a cable swing my Cub Scout den mother had mentioned. I combined that memory with several others, including a lie I told about making arrows and shooting them at a neighborhood kid from a tree house, and my fascination with the storm sewer system in my town and the possibility of getting lost down there and never finding my way out. As I was developing these memories and exploring the character of a young girl who perhaps shared a few of my less appealing qualities as a human being, I read a passage in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (I forget which edition) that described a delusion (that is, the holding of a demonstrably untrue belief) as symptomatic of mental illness, unless the delusion is shared by a group of people. In other words, the psychiatric community has decided that mental illnesses are not communicable. If two or more people hold a delusional belief in common, we don’t get to call them crazy. This loophole fuelled my imagination and created in me both a deeper sense of mystery around, and a more compelling reason for, the telling of Jeannie Ivory’s story. It provided an essential source of conflict—between Jeannie Ivory, who holds a private set of untenable beliefs, and the members of a local congregation, who hold an equally untenable set of beliefs but get to call it their faith.Why do you write?Probably because someone told me I was good at it when I was impressionable enough to think it meant I would never want for love, acceptance, notoriety, and dates. It became a habit, and as with any drug, as returns diminish, demand accelerates. I write because I need to, and because I’m introverted enough to abhor twelve-step programs.How do you deal with bad reviews, rejection and criticism?I pout. I throw things. I blame the cat.What do you find difficult about writing?Ignoring Facebook.Stories that don’t write themselves.Outlining.Characters who won’t adhere to an outline.Straddling the gulf between the story I outlined and the one that emerges from the unprescribed and unauthorized behaviour of intractable characters.Spellcheckers with limited vocabularies.Not using big words.What do you love the most about writing?Using big words.I get to kill people who think they’re the boss of me.The English language is insanely beautiful and difficult and has rules galore that make the construction of a single meaningful sentence an act of defiance as satisfying as flying without wings or a jetpack, even.Writing is a form of lucid dreaming. I love a good lucid dream, but I can make pictures in my head more predictably when I’m awake than when I’m asleep. And stories are easier to remember, because unlike my dreams, I write them down.It gets me off Facebook.Do you ever outsource (editing and cover design) your work?I should. I really should. Make that, yes, I will hire an editor for the next book. But the thing is, for Tangible Angels, I didn’t know anyone who could edit Oklahoman English without screwing up all the lovely idiomatic rhythms left over after Appalachia flattens out under those big, gorgeous, cumulated skies.What is your opinion on the indie vs traditional publishing argument?I’ve been indie publishing since my brother and I printed the inaugural issue of a religious magazine on the offset printer at our church. Our covers featured the evangelist Orifice Edifice. Inside, we included Scratch ‘n Sniff Anointing Oil in the palm of Reverend Edifice’s Xeroxed hand for those in need of healing and little DIY Communion packets for shut-ins. We didn’t sell a lot of subscriptions.I will say this: CreateSpace is way more accepting of innovative ideas.Talk us through your creative process from start to finish.Hoo boy. My calendar book says I write from 9 to 11 am daily. That’s a lie I’d like to believe in. In fact I often wake at 3 am because I have to pee, then can’t get back to sleep, so I make coffee and draw until my eyelids get heavy. I might wake up at 7, drink more coffee and sit at the computer, figuring I’m ahead of the game and might as well check my email. That takes until noon. After lunch, I do things for money, mostly related to other people’s websites. On days when I actually write, it goes something like this: I open Word and read what I wrote last Thursday, edit a little, then try to push the story I’m working on in the direction of something important I hope is about to happen. Important things I hope will happen are what I believe writers grounded in narrative theory refer to as plot points.What advice would you give to aspiring writers?Forget everything anybody ever tried to teach you about plot points. Write your heart out. Believe in your characters. Kill the ones you have no faith in. When I say “have faith in your characters,” I mean: in their ability to get themselves into impossible situations. Getting them out alive is optional. Happy endings are plentiful in fiction, and therefore cheap. Endings that rip the heart out of the reader’s chest and devour it while it’s still beating are more dear.Find a rule, break a rule.If you can find one, join a local, sit-down-together-face-to-face writing group with people capable of offering informed, helpful critique. If you can’t find one, start one. Learning how to give informed, helpful criticism will make you a better writer.Log out of Facebook. Turn off Twitter.Give us your top three book marketing/ promotion tips.Log back in to Twitter and Facebook.Meanwhile, understand that book jacket copy is the hardest kind of writing you will ever do. You have to get the blurb right. There is a science to it, and it’s worth studying. If I were you, I’d start working on your blurb as soon as you think you’ve got a novel worth writing. First lines get all the glory, but if the back-cover copy doesn’t do its job, nobody’s going to read that awesome first line.Be a kind human. Care about people who are not your characters. Why? Because self-promotion won’t get you very far. You need other people to promote you, and nobody promotes an emotional miser.I find it easier to promote other people’s books than I do my own. I think I’m not alone in that. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find a way to promote other writers, like Rachel does?Would you agree a good book must withstand more than one read?So much depends on the reader’s age, developmental level, and life experience. There are great books that made me laugh and cry when I first read them but that no longer move me, because I’ve absorbed them, or they’ve finished with me in some significant way. A lot of Twain is like that for me. He was important to me as a young man. I read and re-read him. Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, John Gardner, Ursula LeGuin, John Cheever—they still do it for me. My ability to draw from the same well twice may or may not be related to how good a book is--how important, how relevant across time, and so on. Sometimes I just don’t have, or no longer have, what a reader needs to bring to a certain book. There’s no friend in the world like a book you can come back to again and again, though. One you share old memories with, that still has more to give and still can still surprise you.What do you look for when shopping on Amazon for a Kindle book? Are any of them more important to you than others?Cover / Title / Author / Price / Description / Publisher / Sample Chapter / ReviewsI tend not to browse Amazon the way I do the shelves of a brick-and-mortar bookstore. I follow a link or search for a title because somebody has recommended a specific book or because someone I know (virtually or otherwise) has published a book that interests me. I shop blogs, not online bookstores. Which means, I suppose, that when it comes to purchasing fiction online, I shop authors, not necessarily books. It’s something I hadn’t thought about in quite this way before, so thanks for the question!But I think I may not have answered in a way that’s helpful, so let me say a bad cover is the hardest thing for me to get past. I’m so judgmental that way. If a book looks like an amateur put it together, it’s hard to get me interested. A provocative title is almost as good as a great first line. Price? I’m a fool with my money. I think I’ve said how important I think a book’s description is, but I couldn’t care less who published it. Sample chapters are nice, but I’ll probably only read a couple paragraphs before I’ve decided to buy or not. Reviews? No. I rarely scroll down the page that far. As a writer, I know how important Amazon reviews are, but honestly I don’t understand it. They are meaningless to me as a reader. Reviews written by people whose opinions I respect (usually on a blog or in a magazine) are another matter.Do you have a favourite genre?Fantasy or, more broadly, speculative fiction. But I say that because nobody quite gets what slipstream is. I like fiction that wears corrective lenses. The world-as-it-is, is a distorted reality, but because it is co-created by so many of us, it has gravity and it can kill you. Escape requires velocity. The best fiction looks back at us with eyes wide open, because we are such a surprise to ourselves.What would it take for you to leave a book review?I would have to love your book and want to help the world beat as many paths to it as possible. I used to review books for several review sites and, depending on the site’s policy, post them to Amazon and Goodreads. But I’ve stopped taking ARCs or free copies in exchange for reviews. I no longer review books by friends, because who needs enemies?After downloading book one of a series for free or discounted on Amazon, do you ever go back and pay more for book two? If not, why?I never take advantage of free offers except for very specific non-fiction books that promise to teach me something I want to know, usually with the understanding that the book is an advertisement for more knowledge or expertise that costs money. When it comes to fiction, I want to pay. I don’t want free. I don’t like free. If writing fiction is how you want to make a living, please find something else to give away. I know everybody says you have to give books away, and I know they have statistics to prove me wrong, but giving away your core product is bad business, and I don’t want you to do it. I’d rather you convince me I need your book enough to give you money for it.Do you ever visit an author's website? If so, what do you look at?Yes. I look at the pictures. Then I look at the words. If the pictures are more interesting than the words, I go back to the pictures. If the words are more interesting than the pictures, I look for a tab that says “Books”.If an author offered you a free book, would you sign up to their mailing list?Nope.Do you ever enter giveaways and/ or order signed copies?Yes, and I have a pair of goggles and a leather aviator’s cap to prove it.Are you more likely to buy a book if there are various formats available?Not necessarily.What are the biggest giveaways that a book is self-published?A lousy cover and a book description that reads like a synopsis.If you would like to support this author, please consider purchasing a copy of the book as seen below.
You are living in the world from your latest novel. Where are you? What is it like?You won’t find Keening on most maps of Oklahoma, but if you take Route 60 at Fairview and head west toward Seiling, then north on N2370 and take a left at some point, you’re apt to come across an old boy making lazy circles on a riding lawnmower in the front yard of his daddy’s farmhouse. It’s the one with black shutters and a barn that lists in the direction of the ceaseless wind. He might be able to point you the right way. He likes walnuts if you have any.You are your most recent protagonist. Who are you? What is the first thing you do?My name’s Vanessa. I own and operate a shop out south of town called Tangible Angels. First thing I do of a morning? Especially now that Jeannie’s gone, you’re liable to find me wandering down to the canyon like my grandma did in her old age, though I’m only pushing forty and I ain’t half as suicidal as she was. Just mystified. Folks say all sorts of things about me, a few of which hold some semblance to fact. Believe what you choose, but no, I do not pine for Jeannie Ivory’s return. I worry myself half to death she might is more like it.Who is your favourite author? Why?That covers a lot of territory. Lately, I wish I could write stories as charming and as odd as Raoul Dahl’s, but write them for adults and give them titles that do not alliterate. Ursula LeGuin and John Gardner (the one who wrote Grendel and October Light) win my all-time admiration. Gardner taught me how to carve a sentence as sturdy as a walking stick and to trust my sense of rhythm. LeGuin’s the one who, for me, made writing fantasy seem a useful thing to do.Where do you get your ideas?I am of two minds, one of which does not go looking for story ideas because it doesn’t put much stock in them. I’m more interested in people and in their ideas—that is, in the beliefs, values and desires that drive them into conflict with one another and cause them to do crazy, sometimes noble, things. That’s where stories come from in my view, from the collision of ideas already at play in the world, not from new ideas I need to come up with or root around for. I watch politics. I spy on the neighbors. I practice armchair psychology.On the other hand, I can trace Tangible Angels back to a specific conglomeration of ideas and try to describe how they came together to make a story. So let me do that.As an assignment for a correspondence course in writing for children, I explored a memory from my childhood in Oklahoma, an excursion down North Boggy Creek to find a cable swing my Cub Scout den mother had mentioned. I combined that memory with several others, including a lie I told about making arrows and shooting them at a neighborhood kid from a tree house, and my fascination with the storm sewer system in my town and the possibility of getting lost down there and never finding my way out. As I was developing these memories and exploring the character of a young girl who perhaps shared a few of my less appealing qualities as a human being, I read a passage in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (I forget which edition) that described a delusion (that is, the holding of a demonstrably untrue belief) as symptomatic of mental illness, unless the delusion is shared by a group of people. In other words, the psychiatric community has decided that mental illnesses are not communicable. If two or more people hold a delusional belief in common, we don’t get to call them crazy. This loophole fuelled my imagination and created in me both a deeper sense of mystery around, and a more compelling reason for, the telling of Jeannie Ivory’s story. It provided an essential source of conflict—between Jeannie Ivory, who holds a private set of untenable beliefs, and the members of a local congregation, who hold an equally untenable set of beliefs but get to call it their faith.Why do you write?Probably because someone told me I was good at it when I was impressionable enough to think it meant I would never want for love, acceptance, notoriety, and dates. It became a habit, and as with any drug, as returns diminish, demand accelerates. I write because I need to, and because I’m introverted enough to abhor twelve-step programs.How do you deal with bad reviews, rejection and criticism?I pout. I throw things. I blame the cat.What do you find difficult about writing?Ignoring Facebook.Stories that don’t write themselves.Outlining.Characters who won’t adhere to an outline.Straddling the gulf between the story I outlined and the one that emerges from the unprescribed and unauthorized behaviour of intractable characters.Spellcheckers with limited vocabularies.Not using big words.What do you love the most about writing?Using big words.I get to kill people who think they’re the boss of me.The English language is insanely beautiful and difficult and has rules galore that make the construction of a single meaningful sentence an act of defiance as satisfying as flying without wings or a jetpack, even.Writing is a form of lucid dreaming. I love a good lucid dream, but I can make pictures in my head more predictably when I’m awake than when I’m asleep. And stories are easier to remember, because unlike my dreams, I write them down.It gets me off Facebook.Do you ever outsource (editing and cover design) your work?I should. I really should. Make that, yes, I will hire an editor for the next book. But the thing is, for Tangible Angels, I didn’t know anyone who could edit Oklahoman English without screwing up all the lovely idiomatic rhythms left over after Appalachia flattens out under those big, gorgeous, cumulated skies.What is your opinion on the indie vs traditional publishing argument?I’ve been indie publishing since my brother and I printed the inaugural issue of a religious magazine on the offset printer at our church. Our covers featured the evangelist Orifice Edifice. Inside, we included Scratch ‘n Sniff Anointing Oil in the palm of Reverend Edifice’s Xeroxed hand for those in need of healing and little DIY Communion packets for shut-ins. We didn’t sell a lot of subscriptions.I will say this: CreateSpace is way more accepting of innovative ideas.Talk us through your creative process from start to finish.Hoo boy. My calendar book says I write from 9 to 11 am daily. That’s a lie I’d like to believe in. In fact I often wake at 3 am because I have to pee, then can’t get back to sleep, so I make coffee and draw until my eyelids get heavy. I might wake up at 7, drink more coffee and sit at the computer, figuring I’m ahead of the game and might as well check my email. That takes until noon. After lunch, I do things for money, mostly related to other people’s websites. On days when I actually write, it goes something like this: I open Word and read what I wrote last Thursday, edit a little, then try to push the story I’m working on in the direction of something important I hope is about to happen. Important things I hope will happen are what I believe writers grounded in narrative theory refer to as plot points.What advice would you give to aspiring writers?Forget everything anybody ever tried to teach you about plot points. Write your heart out. Believe in your characters. Kill the ones you have no faith in. When I say “have faith in your characters,” I mean: in their ability to get themselves into impossible situations. Getting them out alive is optional. Happy endings are plentiful in fiction, and therefore cheap. Endings that rip the heart out of the reader’s chest and devour it while it’s still beating are more dear.Find a rule, break a rule.If you can find one, join a local, sit-down-together-face-to-face writing group with people capable of offering informed, helpful critique. If you can’t find one, start one. Learning how to give informed, helpful criticism will make you a better writer.Log out of Facebook. Turn off Twitter.Give us your top three book marketing/ promotion tips.Log back in to Twitter and Facebook.Meanwhile, understand that book jacket copy is the hardest kind of writing you will ever do. You have to get the blurb right. There is a science to it, and it’s worth studying. If I were you, I’d start working on your blurb as soon as you think you’ve got a novel worth writing. First lines get all the glory, but if the back-cover copy doesn’t do its job, nobody’s going to read that awesome first line.Be a kind human. Care about people who are not your characters. Why? Because self-promotion won’t get you very far. You need other people to promote you, and nobody promotes an emotional miser.I find it easier to promote other people’s books than I do my own. I think I’m not alone in that. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could find a way to promote other writers, like Rachel does?Would you agree a good book must withstand more than one read?So much depends on the reader’s age, developmental level, and life experience. There are great books that made me laugh and cry when I first read them but that no longer move me, because I’ve absorbed them, or they’ve finished with me in some significant way. A lot of Twain is like that for me. He was important to me as a young man. I read and re-read him. Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, John Gardner, Ursula LeGuin, John Cheever—they still do it for me. My ability to draw from the same well twice may or may not be related to how good a book is--how important, how relevant across time, and so on. Sometimes I just don’t have, or no longer have, what a reader needs to bring to a certain book. There’s no friend in the world like a book you can come back to again and again, though. One you share old memories with, that still has more to give and still can still surprise you.What do you look for when shopping on Amazon for a Kindle book? Are any of them more important to you than others?Cover / Title / Author / Price / Description / Publisher / Sample Chapter / ReviewsI tend not to browse Amazon the way I do the shelves of a brick-and-mortar bookstore. I follow a link or search for a title because somebody has recommended a specific book or because someone I know (virtually or otherwise) has published a book that interests me. I shop blogs, not online bookstores. Which means, I suppose, that when it comes to purchasing fiction online, I shop authors, not necessarily books. It’s something I hadn’t thought about in quite this way before, so thanks for the question!But I think I may not have answered in a way that’s helpful, so let me say a bad cover is the hardest thing for me to get past. I’m so judgmental that way. If a book looks like an amateur put it together, it’s hard to get me interested. A provocative title is almost as good as a great first line. Price? I’m a fool with my money. I think I’ve said how important I think a book’s description is, but I couldn’t care less who published it. Sample chapters are nice, but I’ll probably only read a couple paragraphs before I’ve decided to buy or not. Reviews? No. I rarely scroll down the page that far. As a writer, I know how important Amazon reviews are, but honestly I don’t understand it. They are meaningless to me as a reader. Reviews written by people whose opinions I respect (usually on a blog or in a magazine) are another matter.Do you have a favourite genre?Fantasy or, more broadly, speculative fiction. But I say that because nobody quite gets what slipstream is. I like fiction that wears corrective lenses. The world-as-it-is, is a distorted reality, but because it is co-created by so many of us, it has gravity and it can kill you. Escape requires velocity. The best fiction looks back at us with eyes wide open, because we are such a surprise to ourselves.What would it take for you to leave a book review?I would have to love your book and want to help the world beat as many paths to it as possible. I used to review books for several review sites and, depending on the site’s policy, post them to Amazon and Goodreads. But I’ve stopped taking ARCs or free copies in exchange for reviews. I no longer review books by friends, because who needs enemies?After downloading book one of a series for free or discounted on Amazon, do you ever go back and pay more for book two? If not, why?I never take advantage of free offers except for very specific non-fiction books that promise to teach me something I want to know, usually with the understanding that the book is an advertisement for more knowledge or expertise that costs money. When it comes to fiction, I want to pay. I don’t want free. I don’t like free. If writing fiction is how you want to make a living, please find something else to give away. I know everybody says you have to give books away, and I know they have statistics to prove me wrong, but giving away your core product is bad business, and I don’t want you to do it. I’d rather you convince me I need your book enough to give you money for it.Do you ever visit an author's website? If so, what do you look at?Yes. I look at the pictures. Then I look at the words. If the pictures are more interesting than the words, I go back to the pictures. If the words are more interesting than the pictures, I look for a tab that says “Books”.If an author offered you a free book, would you sign up to their mailing list?Nope.Do you ever enter giveaways and/ or order signed copies?Yes, and I have a pair of goggles and a leather aviator’s cap to prove it.Are you more likely to buy a book if there are various formats available?Not necessarily.What are the biggest giveaways that a book is self-published?A lousy cover and a book description that reads like a synopsis.If you would like to support this author, please consider purchasing a copy of the book as seen below.
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